Complete Works of Wilkie Collins (1661 page)

“May I ask, is this your first dinner since you came back?”

“Oh, no! we have been in town for some weeks.”

“Indeed? I should really have thought, now, that this was your first dinner.”

“Should you? I can’t imagine why.”

“How very odd, when the reason is as plain as possible! Why, I noticed you all dinner-time, eating and drinking what you liked, without looking at your husband for orders. I saw nothing rebellious in your face when you eat all these nice sweet things at dessert. Dear! dear! don’t you understand? Do you really mean to say that your husband has not begun yet? Did he not say, as you drove here to-day, ‘Now, mind, I’m not going to have another night’s rest broken, because you always choose to make yourself ill with stuffing creams and sweets, and all that sort of thing?’ No!!! Mercy on me, what an odd man he must be! Perhaps he waits till he gets home again? Oh, come, come; you don’t mean to tell me that he doesn’t storm at you frightfully for having every one of your glasses filled with wine, and then never touching a drop of it, but asking for cold water instead, at the very elbow of the master of the house? If he says, ‘Cursed perversity, and want of proper tact’ once,
I
know he says it a dozen times. And as for treading on your dress in the hall, and then bullying you before the servant for not holding it up out of his way, it’s too common a thing to be mentioned — isn’t it? Did you notice Mr. Tincklepaw particularly? Ah, you did, and you thought he looked good-natured? No! no! don’t say any more; don’t say you know better than to trust to appearances. Please do take leave of all common sense and experience, and pray trust to appearances, without thinking of their invariable deceitfulness, this once. Do, dear, to oblige
me.”

I might fill pages with similar examples of the manners and conversation of this intolerable Lady-Bore. I might add other equally aggravating characters, to her character and to Miss Sticker’s, without extending my researches an inch beyond the circle of my own acquaintance. But I am true to my unfeminine resolution to write as briefly as if I were a man; and I feel that I have said enough already, to show that I can prove my case. When a woman like me can produce, without the least hesitation, or the slightest difficulty, two such instances of Lady-Bores as I have just exhibited, the additional number which she might pick out of her list, after a little mature reflection, may be logically inferred by all impartial readers.

In the mean time, let me hope I have succeeded sufficiently well in my present purpose to induce our next great satirist to pause before he, too, attacks his harmless fellow-men, and to make him turn his withering glance in the direction of our sex. Let all rising young gentlemen who are racking their brains in search of originality take the timely hint which I have given them in these pages. Let us have a new fictitious literature, in which not only the Bores shall be women, but the villains too. Look at Shakspeare — do, pray, look at Shakspeare. Who is most in fault, in that shocking business of the murder of King Duncan? Lady Macbeth, to be sure! Look at King Lear, with a small family of only three daughters, and two of the three wretches; and even the third an aggravating girl, who can’t be commonly civil to her own father in the first act, out of sheer contradiction, because her elder sisters happen to have been civil before her. Look at Desdemona, who falls in love with a horrid, copper-coloured foreigner, and then, like a fool, instead of managing him, aggravates him into smothering her. Ah! Shakspeare was a great man, and knew our sex, and was not afraid to show he knew it. What a blessing it would be if some of his literary brethren in modern times could muster courage enough to follow his example!

I have fifty different things to say, but I shall bring myself to a conclusion by only mentioning one of them. If it would at all contribute toward forwarding the literary reform that I advocate, to make a present of the characters of Miss Sticker and Mrs. Tincklepaw to modern writers of fiction, I shall be delighted to abandon all right of proprietorship in those two odious women. At the same time, I think it fair to explain that, when I speak of modern writers, I mean gentlemen writers only. I wish to say nothing uncivil to the ladies who compose books, whose effusions may, by the rule of contraries, be exceedingly agreeable to male readers; but I positively forbid them to lay hands upon my two characters. I am charmed to be of use to the men, in a literary point of view, but I decline altogether to mix myself up with the women. There need be no fear of offending them by printing this candid expression of my intentions. Depend on it, they will all declare, on their sides, that they would much rather have nothing to do with
me.

SKETCHES OF CHARACTER. — I.

TALK-STOPPERS.

WE hear a great deal of lamentation nowadays, proceeding mostly from elderly people, on the decline of the Art of Conversation among us. Old ladies and gentlemen with vivid recollections of the charms of society fifty years ago, are constantly asking each other why the great talkers of their youthful days have found no successors in this inferior present time. Where — they inquire mournfully — where are the illustrious men and women gifted with a capacity for perpetual outpouring from the tongue, who used to keep enraptured audiences deluged in a flow of eloquent monologue for hours together? Where are the solo-talkers, in this degenerate age of nothing but choral conversation?

The solo-talkers have vanished. Nothing but the tradition of them remains, imperfectly preserved in books for the benefit of an ungrateful posterity, which reviles their surviving contemporaries, and would perhaps even have reviled the illustrious creatures themselves as Bores. If they could rise from the dead, and wag their unresting tongues among us now, would they win their reputations anew, just as easily as ever? Would they even get listeners? Would they be actually allowed to talk? I venture to say, decidedly not. They would surely be interrupted and contradicted; they would have their nearest neighbours at the dinner-table talking across them; they would find impatient people opposite, dropping things noisily, and ostentatiously picking them up; they would hear confidential whispering, and perpetual fidgeting in distant corners, before they had got through their first half dozen of eloquent opening sentences. Nothing appears to me so wonderful as that none of these interruptions (if we are to believe report) should ever have occurred in the good old times of the great talkers. I read long biographies of that large class of illustrious individuals whose fame is confined to the select circle of their own acquaintance, and I find that they were to a man, whatever other differences may have existed between them, all delightful talkers. I am informed that they held forth entrancingly for hours together, at all times and seasons, and that I, the gentle, constant, and patient reader, am one of the most unfortunate and pitiable of human beings in never having enjoyed the luxury of hearing them; but, strangely enough, I am never told whether they were occasionally interrupted or not in the course of their outpourings. I am left to infer that their friends sat under them just as a congregation sits under a pulpit; and I ask myself amazedly (remembering what society is at the present day), whether human nature can have changed altogether since that time. Either the reports in the biographies are one-sided and imperfect, or the race of people whom I frequently meet with now — and whom I venture to call talk-stoppers, because their business in life seems to be the obstructing, confusing, and interrupting of all conversation — must be the peculiar and portentous growth of our own degenerate era.

Perplexed by this dilemma, when I am reading in long biographies about great talkers, I do not find myself lamenting, like my seniors, that they have left no successors in our day, or doubting irreverently, like my juniors, whether the famous performers of conversational solos were really as well worth hearing as eulogistic report would fain have us believe. The one invariable question that I put to myself under these circumstances runs thus: Could the great talkers, if they had lived in my time, have talked at all? And the answer I receive is: In the vast majority of cases, certainly not.

Let me not unnecessarily mention names, but let me ask, for example, if some such famous talker as, say — the Great Glib — could have discoursed uninterruptedly for five minutes together in the presence of my friend Colonel Hopkirk?

The colonel goes a great deal into society; he is the kindest and gentlest of men; but he unconsciously stops, or confuses conversation everywhere, solely in consequence of his own sociable horror of ever differing in opinion with anybody. If A should begin by declaring black to be black, Colonel Hopkirk would be sure to agree with him before he had half done. If B followed, and declared black to be white, the colonel would be on his side of the question before he had argued it out; and, if C peaceably endeavored to calm the dispute with a truism, and trusted that every one would at least admit that black and white in combination made gray, my ever-compliant friend would pat him on the shoulder approvingly all the while he was talking; would declare that C’s conclusion was, after all, the common sense of the question; and would set A and B furiously disputing which of them he agreed or disagreed with now, and whether on the great Black, White and Gray question, Colonel Hopkirk could really be said to have any opinion at all.

How could the Great Glib hold forth in the company of such a man as this? Let us suppose that delightful talker, with a few of his admirers (including, of course, the writer of his biography), and Colonel Hopkirk, to be all seated at the same table; and let us say that one of the admirers is anxious to get the mellifluous Glib to discourse on capital punishment for the benefit of the company. The admirer begins, of course, on the approved method of stating the objections to capital punishment, and starts the subject in this manner: “I was dining out, the other day, Mr. Glib, where capital punishment turned up as a topic of conversation — ”

“Ah!” says Colonel Hopkirk, “a dreadful necessity — yes, yes, yes, I see — a dreadful necessity — eh?”

“And the arguments for its abolition,” continues the admirer, without noticing the interruption, “were really handled with great dexterity by one of the gentlemen present, who started, of course, with the assertion that it is unlawful, under any circumstances, to take away life — ”

“Unlawful, of course!” cries the colonel. “Very well put. Yes, yes — unlawful — to be sure — so it is — unlawful, as you say.”

“Unlawful, sir?” begins the Great Glib, severely. “Have I lived to this time of day, to hear that it is unlawful to protect the lives of the community by the only certain means — ?”

“No, no — oh dear me, no!” says the compliant Hopkirk, with the most unblushing readiness. “Protect their lives, of course — as you say, protect their lives by the only certain means — yes, yes, I quite agree with you.”

“Allow me, colonel,” says another admirer, anxious to assist in starting the great talker, “allow me to remind our friend, before he takes this question in hand, that it is an argument of the abolitionists that perpetual imprisonment would answer the purpose of protecting society — ”

The colonel is so delighted with this last argument that he bounds on his chair, and rubs his hands in triumph. “My dear sir!” he cries, before the last speaker can say another word, “you have hit it — you have, indeed! Perpetual imprisonment — that’s the thing — ah, yes, yes, yes, to be sure — perpetual imprisonment — the very thing, my dear sir — the very thing!”

“Excuse me,” says a third admirer, “but I think Mr. Glib was about to speak. You were saying, sir — ?”

“The whole question of capital punishment,” begins the delightful talker, leaning back luxuriously in his chair, “lies in a nutshell.” (“Very true,” from the colonel.) “I murder one of you — say Hopkirk here.” (“Ha! ha! ha!” loudly from the colonel, who thinks himself bound to laugh at a joke when he is only wanted to listen to an illustration.) “I murder Hopkirk. What is the first object of all the rest of you, who represent the community at large?” (“To have you hanged,” from the colonel. “Ah, yes, to be sure! to have you hanged. Quite right! quite right!”) “Is it to make me a reformed character, to teach me a trade, to wash my bloodstains off me delicately, and set me up again in society, looking as clean as the best of you? No!” (“No!” from the compliant colonel.) “Your object is clearly to prevent me from murdering any more of you. And how are you to do that most completely and certainly? Can you accomplish your object by perpetual imprisonment?” (“Ah! I thought we should all agree about it at last,” cries the colonel, cheerfully. “Yes, yes — nothing else for it but perpetual imprisonment, as you say.”) “By perpetual imprisonment? But men have broken out of prison.” (“So they have,” from the colonel.) “Men have killed their jailers; and there you have the commission of that very second murder that you wanted to prevent.” (“Quite right,” from the compliant Talk-Stopper. “A second murder — dreadful! dreadful!”)”Imprisonment is not your certain protective remedy, then, evidently. What is?”

“Hanging!!!” cries the colonel, with another bound in his chair, and a voice that can no longer be talked down. “Hanging, to be sure! I quite agree with you. Just what I said from the first. You have hit it, my dear sir. Hanging, as you say — hanging, by all manner of means!”