NEVER MIND. A LL sorts of notions become " the rage
" for a while. Very small passions are a matter of fashion. We feel we must have this, that or the other, and do this, that and the other, and everybody gets the feeling at the same time. Sooner or later, at the end of a year or two or of a generation or two, as the case may be, the rage fizzles out in laughter. Everyone wonders how anybody could be so silly, and assures himself that no such nonsense could take hold of the public " in these days." But probably just the same sort of spell has again been cast even over his own mind at the moment that he is making the comment. All new notions seem reasonable enough till they become stale.
This is as true in a negative as in a positive sense. We " mind " doing certain things ; great sections of the world become suddenly obsessed by an unaccountable distaste for particular conditions or activities. (By the by, it is very strange that the word " mind " should have come to be used in this sense. It is difficult to follow the steps by which such an extension of meaning has come about ; something analogous seems to have happened in the case of the word " concern.") There can be little doubt that one of these passions of distaste has created the servant trouble. Servants suddenly and all together took it into their heads to " mind " wearing a uniform which proclaimed their profession ; to mind living in a basement ; to mind answering a bell. Meanwhile, their employers have made a virtue of necessity and boast that there is nothing in the way of domestic work to which they feel the slightest distaste, and are hardly able to realize that for gener- ations their mothers and grandmothers felt it so keenly that they could hardly bring themselves to do it and pitied from the bottom of their hearts any member of their own class upon whom poverty forced it. Perhaps the boasters have also some foolish little distaste which still enslaves them as a body ; but just because it is common to them all it does not seem unreasonable. Now and then these recurrent notions are mixed up with serious moral consider- ations and make it hard, at any rate for the generation which is passing, away, to take a just view of the signs of the times. Nowadays we do not mind seeing our young people do things which would have outraged Victorian taste. For instance, what we may call the roof " theory is dead for everyone under fifty. The best brought up girl may now dine and dance under the same roof with persons with whom her natural guardians would be horrified that she should associate. This does not mean that respectable society has abated one jot of its principles. It merely means that they do not now regard the convention of the roof. That is one of the things that they have ceased to mind about. After all, the notion was always arbitrary. No one over inquired the characters of those with whom they travelled in a railway train or sat next at a play. The change has little to do with the widening or loosening of ideas. It derives from necessity : so little entertainment is now possible for the middle classes in their own homes. Again, men hated that their womenfolk should in any way figure in public. Now nobody minds. Indeed, the whole attitude towards publicity has changed. The few crave for it as they always did, but the many have adopted towards it the very dignified attitude of entire indifference. Not to mind whether or no the passers- by can see in at your windows argues more good pride and in a sense more true humility than the intense tips° of one's own importance which led to wire blinds and heavy curtains, high walls, hideous green bushes, and hiding generally. Another small distaste which is passing away is the distaste for strong language. Nobody minds now about swearing so long as it is indulged in within limits. There was a day many years ago when the Spectator began an article in defence of the practice with the words, " Sin cannot reside in an expletive." This obiter dictum was thought then—in mid-Victorian times—to be daring. Now even women have claimed the right thus to relieve their feelings—or hide a poor vocabulary. Swearing seems to be a recurrent fashion with very slight social bearing. It comes and goes with the regularity of the seasons, only at longer intervals.
An important distaste which is still strong upon us is our dislike to live near our work. The better a man succeeds the further away from it he goes to sleep at night and to spend Saturday and Sunday. The new love of Nature does not account for more than half of this feeling, and even the increase in the population will not explain the whole of it. If a man said to us that he and his wife did not " mind " living above his office or his big shop, we should think him singular, even though we knew that he went no further afield when his work was over than Mayfair or Kensington. The doctor alone maintains the old fashion of living about his consulting room—even those doctors, we mean, who are not liable to be called up at night. Facilities of transit, again, do not altogether explain the growth of the suburbs and the forsaking or conversion to business premises of former residential neighbourhoods. The merchant of the past had horses and could have driven out of town in as short a time as it takes his great-grandson to get out by train. He had a distaste for the short journey which no one now minds. He wished to take two or three steps only from his breakfast to his desk. The day may come when he wishes it again, when he hates the very real effort of constantly " coming up and down," and the great flats over the great shops and splendid houses in the older and more central squares become the envied palaces of the rich. If the slum-dwellers would only take it into their heads to live in the suburbs, and the poorer suburban population came back and rebuilt the slums, what a healthy, handsome city we should have ! At present, however, no one seems to " mind " the train, though there is barely room to stand in it. It is not so wonderful that convulsive distastes should sway communities when one considers how strong is their hold upon individual& Almost all of us have one or two petty repugnances. We can hardly bring ourselves to do certain social duties to which the majority of the world has no objection. Take such a small duty, for instance, as the filling in of a form. If we will read it we shall understand it, unless we are utterly uneducated or amazingly stupid. Yet how many people who pass for learned and clever would rather have ten minutes' toothache than sit down to fill in a paper ? How many fill them in wrong and have to do it all over again because they cannot bring themselves to read the whole document through ? These wretched forms create as much bad temper and cause as many oaths as a dozen laundresses to the few who hate tc tackle them. Small, unreasonable repugnances are often allowed by fastidious people to shadow their lives. Par- ticular types of men and women " go against " them as they say. They give way to a feeling which has perhaps no more reasonable origin than a dislike contracted in childhood. They hate people with such-and-such a voice or way of laughing, or even of dressing. It is no exaggeration to say that they will avoid those whose acquaintance would be immensely to their advantage " for the colour of their eyes." Why do you " mind " him or her ? gasp their families in ungrammatical astonish- ment. Self-conscious children and even self-conscious grown-up people are a prey to distastes. The present writer has known two women (both handsome) to whom it was an agony to sit for a portrait or even pose for a moment in a photographer's shop. Some children will stand any amount of ridicule or disapproval rather than cross a room to ask a question of a stranger, and many men will wander a mile out of the way rather than ask a passer-by to direct them. It seems incredible that anyone should mind making this small demand upon the courtesy of a stranger, but they do. Again and again one is tempted as one sees one's strong-willed acquaintances unable to force themselves to disregard these queer little prejudices to wonder if they are in any way connected with some half-obliterated recollection of another life, or is it only a case of inherited experience. Do certain actions bring back vaguely some forgotten misfortune and certain people revive the memory of certain wrongs ? Are these unaccountable shynesses the remains of a savage fear ? Anyhow, grown-up people cannot apparently get over them, but they ought to be discouraged in children, to whom when they become evident their elders should address with new meaning the familiar counsel of childhood, " Never mind."
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