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The Angel and the Author - and Others, a fiction by Jerome K Jerome |
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Chapter 7 |
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_ CHAPTER VII Too much Postcard.
"What a charming old town!" the German tourist would exclaim. "I wish I could have found time while I was there to have gone outside the hotel and have had a look round. Still, it is pleasant to think one has been there." "I suppose you did not have much time?" his friend would suggest. "We did not get there till the evening," the tourist would explain. "We were busy till dark buying postcards, and then in the morning there was the writing and addressing to be done, and when that was over, and we had had our breakfast, it was time to leave again." He would take up another card showing the panorama from a mountain top. "Sublime! colossal!" he would cry enraptured. "If I had known it was anything like that, I'd have stopped another day and had a look at it." It was always worth seeing, the arrival of a party of German tourists in a Schwartzwald village. Leaping from the coach they would surge round the solitary gendarme. "Where is the postcard shop?" "Tell us--we have only two hours--where do we get postcards?" The gendarme, scenting _Trinkgeld_, would head them at the double-quick: stout old gentlemen unaccustomed to the double-quick, stouter Frauen gathering up their skirts with utter disregard to all propriety, slim _Fraulein_ clinging to their beloved would run after him. Nervous pedestrians would fly for safety into doorways, careless loiterers would be swept into the gutter. In the narrow doorway of the postcard shop trouble would begin. The cries of suffocated women and trampled children, the curses of strong men, would rend the air. The German is a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, but in the hunt for postcards he was a beast. A woman would pounce on a tray of cards, commence selecting, suddenly the tray would be snatched from her. She would burst into tears, and hit the person nearest to her with her umbrella. The cunning and the strong would secure the best cards. The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and railway stations. Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and--sucking stumpy pencils--write feverishly. A hurried meal would follow. Then the horses would be put to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had just left might happen to be.
The Postcard as a Family Curse.
"Where are you going?" asks A of B. "Nowhere," answers B. "Can't you afford it?" asks the sympathetic A. "Only been able to save up enough for the postcards," answers B, gloomily; "no money left for the trip." Men and women carried bulky volumes containing the names and addresses of the people to whom they had promised to send cards. Everywhere, through winding forest glade, by silver sea, on mountain pathway, one met with prematurely aged looking tourists muttering as they walked: "Did I send Aunt Gretchen a postcard from that last village that we stopped at, or did I address two to Cousin Lisa?" Then, again, maybe, the picture postcard led to disappointment. Uninteresting towns clamoured, as ill-favoured spinsters in a photographic studio, to be made beautiful. "I want," says the lady, "a photograph my friends will really like. Some of these second-rate photographers make one look quite plain. I don't want you to flatter me, if you understand, I merely want something nice." The obliging photographer does his best. The nose is carefully toned down, the wart becomes a dimple, her own husband doesn't know her. The postcard artist has ended by imagining everything as it might have been. "If it were not for the houses," says the postcard artist to himself, "this might have been a picturesque old High street of mediaeval aspect." So he draws a picture of the High street as it might have been. The lover of quaint architecture travels out of his way to see it, and when he finds it and contrasts it with the picture postcard he gets mad. I bought a postcard myself once representing the market place of a certain French town. It seemed to me, looking at the postcard, that I hadn't really seen France--not yet. I travelled nearly a hundred miles to see that market place. I was careful to arrive on market day and to get there at the right time. I reached the market square and looked at it. Then I asked a gendarme where it was. He said it was there--that I was in it. I said, "I don't mean this one, I want the other one, the picturesque one." He said it was the only market square they had. I took the postcard from my pocket. "Where are all the girls?" I asked him. "What girls?" he demanded.
The Artist's Dream.
"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 I am getting tired of her. I suppose it is the result of growing old.
Why not the Eternal Male for a change?
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.
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.
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