When I was about nine years old my cousins took me to an entertainment at the girls’ school which all but one of them had lately left. Never shall I forget the awkward fear with which I faced a room full of mature and stately beings for whose benefit the conjurer had been summoned. I wondered how he would dare to conjure lightly before an assembly of so many incarnations of Minerva. There was Olympian superiority upon their brows and their flowing locks were surely ambrosial. The one relief was that to them, apparently, I did not exist, though some younger sprites in shorter skirts giggled embarrassingly when I tripped over a chair. Their accomplishments, too, were miraculous; they played such runs upon the piano and the violin, they recited with such aplomb “The Jackdaw of Rheims,” they even did a German play of which, as I was told many years later by my cousin, none of them understood a word. The goddesses graciously unbent when the conjurer was pleased to be facetious and miraculous after the manner of his kind. He delighted me too, that conjurer, but he was the cause, none the less, of my greater humiliation. He needed an accomplice, or shall we say a butt, upon the stage, and, basely taking advantage of my solitary masculinity, he called me out. The Minervas could no longer ignore my miserable existence. There I was exposed to their censorious gaze, a thing in breeches, a most obvious compound of “toads and snails and puppy dogs’ tails,” placed in one of the less dignified positions of this world with no fellow to support me. I held things for the conjurer and they disappeared, I tied knots which were as water, money issued from my nose and perspiration from my forehead. I had to assure the goddesses that I saw no deception, as if all the assurance to be found in that room was not on their side rather than on mine: I even had to pronounce the ridiculous word “Abracadabra” at the critical moment of a more than usually mystifying illusion. Finally I had to hold a glass of water covered with a silk handkerchief. To my inconsolable despair I dropped the glass, which broke with a hideous crash upon the stage. Blushing scarlet and covered with confusion I was invited to make way for “one of the young ladies who no doubt had a steadier hand than a dissipated young man.” I slunk away into obscurity, hating all conjurers and fearing all big girls more than ever.

No lines by an English poet have better crystallised the impression of English womanhood at the moment of its emergence from the chrysalis. The impression, of course, is enormously heightened when it is conveyed in the mass, as in a ceremony at a girls’ school or the sight of the same school progressing formally to church en crocodile. A boy, in the glory of his physical strength and agility, may find it easy to forget the stateliness of one or two, as I did that of my cousins, but no boy exists who would not quail before a combined manifestation.

And yet what were these but flappers, a word which no longer needs inverted commas? It is a typically English product, that quintessence of pertness and levity, that preposterous imitation and caricature of womanhood, that graceless state of pigtaildom, that compound of vanity, abandon, chatter and chocolates, that innocent rakishness, that perverse chastity, that boundless but unconcentrated desire, that rapt satisfaction with the present, that gorgeous hopefulness of the future, that delight to the eye, that distress to the ear; those rosebuds in boys’ buttonholes, those thorns in mothers’ sides, those blankets of intelligent conversation, those pitchers with capacious ears, those graceful runners and hideous walkers, those creatures of soft cheeks, shy souls and shameless hearts, the English flappers. The rise of this phenomenon to a precocious but perfectly definite position in society has been extremely rapid. Half of the present generation in England can remember when flappers were not, and there is no sign in previous history that they were ever intended to be. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance women became wives so early that there was no time for flapperdom, yet any flapper of to-day has more independence than the wife of many a knight who flaunted on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The Puritans did not encourage precocity in young women, and as for the Merry Monarch, there is no record that he paid attentions to ladies who were not yet out. The formal eighteenth century kept young ladies very much “in” till they were married, and this perhaps over-repressive attitude continued well into the Victorian age. The flapper, it must be remembered, is not merely a young woman; if she were no more, she would find her parallel in many a heroine of history or fiction. She is more than young, she is immature: she trades upon her immaturity, using it as a temptation, a protection and an excuse. Her hair is down and her skirts are up—though not much more up to-day, I fear, than those of her aunts—and her imitations of maturity are more in the domain of conduct than of dress or deportment. Until the other day this cheerful being did not exist. Who can imagine Miss Bennet or Emma Woodhouse as flappers? What flapper entered the ken of Dickens or Thackeray or George Meredith, except as a monstrosity? Even Henry James was too early for the flapper, with all his tremendous apparatus of modernity. He touched on some problems of flapperdom in “The Awkward Age” it is true, but the unfortunate Nanda was very much “out” when she began so disconcertingly to complicate the existence of her not too admirable mother. No, the flapper suddenly burst upon an amazed nineteenth century at the moment of its exit in an odour of decadence and Yellow Bookery—how Maudle and Postlethwaite would have hated her!—and rode in triumphantly on the first wave-crest of the twentieth century, a callow Venus with her hands on her hips and her tongue in her cheek.

At present the flapper is English entirely, except in so far as she is also American, and of her mode of existence in that mighty country in which the pretensions of all the female sex are allowed to be infinite and where Ella Wheeler Willcox played Corinna in her teens I am not competent to speak. At what age the mantle of bright omnipotence is allowed to be put on with the petticoat is hidden from me. At all events the English flapper is alone in Europe. In Germany, I imagine, her counterpart is still the unwieldy “Backfisch,” with her plait of coarse light hair and her bob of salutation. She is not a creature of much account: professors feed her mind with knowledge and she feeds her body with chocolate and cream cakes. In France, the most progressive of all Latin countries, the “jeune fille” is still not emancipated,2 in spite of Mademoiselle Lenglen, who has won her way in a censorious world with a tennis racquet. Emancipation is, after all, the note of the flapper: she gives no impression of being held in trust. The “jeune fille” is very much held in trust, a trust which even the most predatory Frenchman will respect. If she is allowed at all to fly, it is as a balloon or a kite at the end of string securely tied to her mother’s apron-strings. She is held in trust, of course, for marriage, an affair which in England is becoming more and more haphazard. For us, whatever other qualities marriage may have—and these may be exquisite—it must, at the least, promise a little diversion. The French, on the contrary, are ready, if need be, to follow Mrs Malaprop’s maxim of beginning with a little aversion. To us, according to our natures, marriage may be primarily a sacrament, an enchantment, or a consummation, but to the French it is essentially an alliance, a solemn and stately word which they properly apply to the wedding ring. With this in prospect little kites must not be allowed to fly too high, nor to become unconscious of the string. They may aspire to greater freedom as much as they please, since it will inevitably come; their curiosities about that free state are not discouraged nor are the arts and graces by which they will shape the most triumphant course untrammelled forgotten; and the joys to which they may attain are kept before them to console them for what they must renounce in the probationary stage. The “jeune fille” may not walk the street of a town alone, after a dance she is returned as a matter of course to her mother, she is not taken out by her boys to dine at restaurants and witness musical comedies from stalls; she does not puff about the country on a motor bicycle nor flash about in the car with the chauffeur for sole cavalier; she does not make a habitual fourth at bridge nor join the lads at snooker when Mama has gone to bed. Indeed, so long as there is any alliance in prospect the French mama never goes to bed, speaking figuratively: she is conscious of the kite-string even in the majesty of her peignoir. The English mama, if she is sensible, takes her normal night’s rest with the addition, possibly, of a nap after lunch. She is not anxious, for, if there is one virtue in the flapper, it is her well-developed faculty of looking after herself.

I permit myself perhaps to speak of the young lady with a certain levity of which she would not approve, for she is apt to take herself pretty seriously, though rather as an individual than as an institution. “My dear,” I heard one say the other day, “I have just taken up theosophy: it’s too thrilling and wonderful. You can’t think what a difference it has made to me.” Her friend, I trust, did not echo my own private reflection that the difference was not yet visible externally, though possibly to the discerning eye her aura had changed colour slightly. Yet the levity, regrettable though it may be, is not in the least to be taken as a cloak for complete disapproval, however negligible such disapproval might be to its objects: it is no more than a trifling insistence—tasteless of course—on the element of comedy that twinkles round this estimable section of feminine society. I respect the flapper, in the first place, because she is on the verge of becoming the young Englishwoman than whom there is no finer creature of her kind. Imperfectly educated she certainly is; ignorance is hers without any mitigating desire for knowledge; artistically she is not successful, nor intellectually; even in dress she has yet to learn, if she ever will, the two advantages of originality and perfect finish: but all this seems almost petty when one considers how magnificent she is as a being, how well made, how frank and generous, how full of energy, how good a comrade, how pleasant a companion. These are the basic virtues of the young Englishwoman, and the flapper has them all. The worst that can be said of her, perhaps, is that she exaggerates certain characteristic shortcomings of her sex in England without contributing any particularly striking grace of her own in compensation. Is there loudness and vulgarity about, then she is conspicuously noisy; is there powder on the nose and carmine upon the lips, then her nose and lips are especially ridiculous; is there a shrill tone, the highest note will be a flapper’s; is there a tendency for the eye to rove, it will be particularly unsuitable in a cheeky orb peeping from a pigtailed head. Her elemental good qualities, at which she would be inclined to turn up her nose, are her principal jewels together with a certain lithe and tempting picturesqueness which is all her own: she is to be loved, at all events, by the discriminating for her promise rather than for her performance and for her very brilliant testimony to the excellence of a social system which encourages and approves this independence in the young. It may be said that the flapper in general is too eager to discount, as she usually does, the pleasures of maturity, but probably this is better for her, in the present and in the future, than to be kept in a state of impatient yearning, of greedy Sehnsucht, which checks the naturally charming spontaneity of her development. In fact, flappers are good and desirable things provided that they do not become too obvious.

There is a certain reason for insistence on this excellent proviso. It may seem paradoxical to argue that the most modern tendency to blur the line of demarcation between the flapper and her elders is a sign of over-obviousness on the part of the former. This line, externally at all events, used to be firmly marked, by the hair on the brow and the skirt about the knee: but now the general cult, bobbed head and the free knee, has made this double line delusive. Short of a study of census returns it would be difficult to tell where the flapper ends and the woman begins. And this confusion—which is my point—does not mean the elimination of the flapper as a separate identity, but rather a prolongation of the flapper standard beyond its legitimate limits. It argues, to my mind, a deplorable abandonment of her own standard on the part of the older woman. Herrick could no longer apostrophise in ecstasy the “sweet liquefaction of her clothes” when he saw his Julia striding along in a woollen jumper and a short tweed skirt with a pudding basin pressed down over her mediÆval bob. Woman’s gift is to give line and animation to drapery, to oppose graciousness of the curve to the masculine rectilinear, and to contrast the poetry of motion with the prose of mere movement. Why is it decreed to-day that all women should

to quote the song from Patience? Only a century ago Englishwomen had adorably drooping shoulders and soft arms; their contours were well rounded or they were miserable. To-day it is the round who are miserable. So marked a physical change is more than accident: it is a symptom of some constitutional or systematic change, and it has let the flapper in as a concrete symbol of the revolution. Personally I could welcome the return of a measure of rotundity, both in form and manner, not the too doughy rotundity of, say, an Amelia Sedley, but something more in the manner of George du Maurier’s drawings in Punch of Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and the statuesque ladies who attended her “at homes.” To George du Maurier that was the English type, and his admiration of it is clear in every line. He idealised possibly, but such idealism does him artistically infinite credit. Angularity, for him, was only the price paid in lost charm for intellect, as in his three Miss Bilderbogies: only extreme cleverness, in his view, could excuse such absence of contour in a woman, and even then the excuse would have to be explicitly made with some humility. Where has it all gone, that amplitude, that richness that was present to his eyes and fed his imagination? One would say that there must have been a shortage of cream somewhere to have so encouraged the Bilderbogie strain and repressed the Ponsonby de Tomkyns. It may have been that there was too much cream in the Ponsonby de Tomkyns stratum and too little elsewhere, an error now remedied by a more even distribution. Let us hope so, in the expectation that the traditional creaminess of things English may again become visible in the community. English girls were once compared to rosebuds and cream: the rose is still there, and no nation can compete with it, but when it comes to a question of cream, the best that the average flapper can boast in her composition is a fairly stiff admixture of milk and soda.

I sometimes wonder if there is anything left for the flapper to look forward to when she comes out, since this formality is still talked of. Possibly there are still some functions closed to her, but they can be few. She is to be found at dinner parties and dances, she has men friends to stand her theatres and chocolates, she can flirt to the utmost limit, and unless she habitually wears a pigtail it is ten to one that nobody will notice anything different in the dressing of her hair. She will be forced to assume, possibly, a greater responsibility, but that is a penalty rather than a pleasure. Let us at any rate give her the credit of reaching consciously a greater seriousness of outlook whether she has to fend for herself or not. Frivolity in its worst sense is not a fault of English girls. Fond as they are of enjoyment and unimaginative as they are in their pleasures, they all take life with a measure of earnestness. The war gave to them, or to many of them, an object for their earnestness of which they had hitherto felt the want. Their seizure of the opportunity does them infinite credit. It would be absurd to suppose that their motives were purely altruistic, for women as a whole are not moved to action by abstract ideas. They saw that there were things to be done and that it might be rather fun to do them. It would need an eloquent pen to tell adequately how well they did them, and the fact that they got some fun out of it, even perhaps more than they expected, can in no way diminish our approbation. I confess that the magnificent services of English girls during the war have moved me deeply, and I cannot find it in me to sympathise with those who are inclined to consider the whole thing rather regrettable, unsettling to the girls and likely to provoke antagonisms when, if ever, we return to peaceful conditions. Surely this is a petty point of view. As a matter of national pride their performance takes on quite another aspect. The women of England were the only ones in the world who served in thousands anywhere and everywhere. Other nations could not get over their prejudices so easily, or only in a few cases. Botchkareva, it is true, organised a Battalion of Death in which Russian women actually fought, but the serving Englishwomen were an army. Also, there was nothing strained about it, nothing unnatural, as it would have been in a Latin nation. Here was a vindication of that British prudery and hypocrisy which other nations like to mock at. Our freedom of intercourse, our comradeship of the sexes, which no other people understands, was triumphantly justified in the test of war. The triumph belongs chiefly to the women: it showed the sterling worth of their essential qualities, independence, fearless capability, untiring energy, cheerfulness under difficulty and coolness in danger. The best of them could lead as well as work, and where they led, as in those Serbian hospitals, men worshipped them, glorifying the country that could produce such women. So when I see, or used to see, a pert little figure in khaki carrying its little powdered nose in the air and being a little silly, I tried to remember that these were superficial defects not gravely detrimental to the value of the article. But they can be so dreadfully and exasperatingly silly, can they not? Even Sister Anne, of Number —— General Hospital, who took me out to tea at Aboukir Bay and gave me a Government hot water bottle as a souvenir, was a little silly, but she was a genuine, jolly being all the same who did her country more credit than she was probably aware of.

This excursus into the topic of the war was really unpremeditated, but, after all, it was almost impossible to leave it out in speaking of the English girl. To omit to record that which is eminently worthy of praise, simply because it has been praised before, besides being ungenerous in a critic, accentuates his strictures beyond his intention. No doubt Mrs Ponsonby de Tomkyns and her age would have responded with equal enthusiasm, but the greater energy and athleticism which succeeded her generation did much to increase the effectiveness of the response when it was actually called for. And now peace is before us again, with much speculation about the future of women. So far as the English girl is concerned, be she flapper or no, I see no reason why she should deteriorate with the disappearance of stress, especially as the condition of modern society for many years to come seems likely to demand strenuous natures.

There is, however, one type of young Englishwoman, still existent, whose extinction would be a blessing. It is the type of Mr Reginald McKenna’s Sonia, that survival of Dodo into an unwilling generation. She is a limited species of course. London, money, society connections, good looks and a vivacious personality are indispensable for success in this line, and this is a combination of elements within the reach of few. Yet she does exist outside the pages of novels, and the harm that she does goes far beyond her own personal futility. She is a bad example, and unfortunately an example too widely held up to admiration. She captures the Press, which delights to reproduce her photograph in her latest posture and to record her latest bid for notoriety, while it would not dare to print a truthful account of her life, with all its vanities and selfishnesses and little immoralities. Her motto is to have a good time even if the world go to pieces. She exaggerates her ego into a god whom it is the duty of life and the world to appease by frequent offerings of incense and enjoyment. Of any duty except to look pretty she is quite unconscious. Any decent feeling she would promptly dub stuffiness. What she wants is glamour and movement from morning to night. The drab and dark side of the world is to be excluded, not by rising superior to it, but by ignoring it and debarring it from approach to the sacred presence, as the revellers in the story tried to debar the red death. It is that kind of young woman who never represses a selfish impulse and who, when self-denial on the part of the community is called for, assumes that the call is intended for the drab beings who earn a daily wage but is not to prejudice the pleasures of superior beings like herself, whose very existence is sufficient privilege for the community to warrant the transfer to its back of any burden that would legitimately have been hers. You see her often enough in London, watching the Russian ballet with an air of proprietorship, as if her appreciation was the only thing that mattered, that of the ordinary herd being cold, earthy and altogether negligible; you may see her selling programmes at charity matinÉes, flattering and fluttering by her radiant presence the audience—"oh, my dear, such quaint stuffy horrors!"—who buy; you will see her in the company of the rich more often than in that of the well bred, for money is to her infinitely more than manners and flashy novelty more than solid worth. She was slightly eclipsed by the war, though it gave her some admirable opportunities for self-display, but it affected her little. It neither wrung her heart nor improved her character, since it was to her but a new excitement and a source of wealth to many of her friends. She dresses garishly, she spends recklessly, she plays high, she dabbles in vice as she dabbles in movements for the sake of fresh sensations for her blasÉ palate. With a ha’porth of wit she gilds an infinite vulgarity, and she has the soul of a courtesan without the courtesan’s excuse. If Rhadamanthus condemns her to be perpetual chambermaid to a hostel in Hades for the souls of lost commercial travellers he will have given her an appropriate task in appropriate company.

There are other types of girl whom many of us may dislike, the pseudo-Bohemian of Chelsea, the dÉtraquÉe enthusiast who formed in old days the main guard of Miss Pankhurst’s army, the spoiled chorus girl whom Mr Compton Mackenzie has so well depicted in “Carnival,” the horsey young lady who can talk of nothing but hunting and the merely vacuous devourer of sweets and sensational novels. Most of these, however, have some compensating virtues and the majority try, at all events, to do something more than exist. Want of opportunity or want of ambition have often landed them in their particular groove and circumscribed their natures: a sudden emergency, in their case, may bring out unsuspected powers and surprisingly latent virtues. The Bohemian young lady of Chelsea, I admit, is extremely irritating, though her worst faults appear on the surface. Her postures, if she only knew it, give an impression of shallowness and pretence, but she is a little intoxicated by the glamour of revolt against convention and the general obtuseness to things artistic, which is an undeniable and annoying fact to those who are not afflicted with it. Chelsea boasts many courageous spirits, not all of them men, however above their accomplishments their aims may be, but it gets deservedly a bad name when it takes up the attitude of regarding all life as nothing but a colour scheme, or an arrangement of line and mass. The issues of life are not all artistic: in fact, the artistic issue is only one of many, supremely important, of course, but not extremely extensive, a fact of which Murger was uncomfortably aware when he wrote the inimitable “ScÈnes de la Vie de BohÈme.” Yet, after all, the artist must have his or her little bit of fanfaronnade, if only to keep the heart up in his desolating struggle to give expression to refractory ideas. The inexcusable beings are those who, not being in any sense artists, presume on a habitation of artistic regions to flourish the borrowed panache more furiously than its legitimate possessor.

The enthusiast in unprofitable causes, with no sense of proportion in her composition, is rather the victim of circumstance than a deliberate sinner. The remedy for her is simply a matter of providing a more fitting channel for her energy and her superfluous emotion. This is difficulty which we have still to face, for the country which, having a large surplus of women over men, gives the former nothing, or not enough to do, is asking for trouble and encouraging the development of its girls into “wild, wild women” in a different sense to that of the song. If it could only be secured that no young Englishwoman entered adult life without a solid interest or a definite direction for her unexpended energy we should neither see the crazy excesses of the suffragettes nor the abysmal apathy which settles on the young in too many suburban drawing rooms, country towns and seaside apartments. The Englishwoman shines far more in activity than in repose: she is most herself with a flush in her cheek and motion in her limbs, and she can never successfully imitate the becoming languour appropriate to the women of sunnier climates. She will move more, I fancy, in the future with less hesitation and a surer sense of direction.

The English girl, as a rule, marries for love. French people say that this is an inadequate reason for marriage, but I doubt if the results in this country are any worse than those of the arranged marriage in France. As a nation we seem to be suited by a certain youthful irresponsibility in this, as in other matters. Also there is the fact that young English folk are not very desperate lovers. They like to believe that they are, of course, and the authors of sentimental fiction encourage the belief, but they take care to combine a good dose of practical sense with their passion. Mistakes occur, it cannot be denied, but they are due rather to flightiness and self-indulgence than to the mad lash of real passion. Juliet may have been a typical English maiden of Shakespeare’s day, but she is not so now, or it would not need an Englishwoman of fifty to play the part properly; and it would be ridiculous to imagine one of our nation assuming in real life the rÔle of Carmen or of a D’Annunzianesque heroine, alternately blazing and languishing in a vapour of eloquence. Rosalind is far more the true English type: she takes some interest in the physical as well as the emotional development of her lover.

Indeed, there are English girls of certain classes who conduct their own alliance almost as coolly and circumspectly as the wariest French mother. For them it is a matter of stages, first walking out, then keeping company, and then the engagement with its solemn ring. But the ring by no means clinches matters: the wait for adequate circumstances to make the marriage advisable may last one year or more. If during that wait the probationer fails to answer expectations, or even himself cools off, the affair is adjusted without undue recrimination. Rings and other presents are returned and, in all probability, another probationer is quickly found to begin the round anew. The methods of the “upper” classes are hasty and ill-considered in comparison, though the grave love making of Sir Walter Scott’s and Jane Austen’s young people will show that this was not always so. Yet, on the whole, in spite of the quite obvious sentimentality of our imaginations on this subject—what other nation has such a vast yearly output of incredibly washy love stories?—we are not unduly sentimental in our actions. Love for us makes the world go round, not merely the head, and it is usually built on a firm foundation of compatability.

The young Englishwoman does not enter upon the matrimonial voyage all of a tremble, which is another excellent thing. She has a fairly shrewd idea of what she wants and of what she is going to get. She is quite aware that marriage entails duties as well as pleasures, but, as she has already had a good deal of the fun, she is soberly ready to welcome the new responsibility which will to some extent diminish it. Men of other nations may think there is something charming in the prospect of leading a timid (but rather hungry) child into a new and fascinating garden full of the delights of the senses and the emotions, but that is not the Englishman’s desire. For him, too, love is not all emotion: his passion is tinged unconsciously with prudence. His nature leads him to look for a companion as well as a divinity, and since he is a simple soul, to whom the refinements of sentiment are tiresome in the long run, he prefers a comrade ready-made to a novice whose transformation into a comrade will take some time and considerable trouble. The English girl is always a comrade, from the nursery onwards. The spirit of comradeship is so deeply ingrained in the family sense of English people that they could not avoid it if they would. It is on that side that you can always best take an English girl, for, though she has vanity too, she is not one of those precious creatures who are sensitive in their vanities and nowhere else; who will take a rebuff calmly if it is delivered with a courtly word, but will bitterly resent a gratification if it is proffered too roughly for their pride. Judged by universal standards Englishmen are splendid husbands but inadequate lovers: Englishwomen are perfect wives but unsatisfactory mistresses.