ON BEING SHOCKED.
THE young, on the whole, are considerate, and let their elders down easily. They select with reason- able care the pieces at the theatre to which they wish to take their mothers, their fathers, their aunts or their uncles. It is a question whether a mother is considered to be, on the average, more or less shockable than a father, but no doubt in practice the personal equation of each individual parent is recognized, classified and allowed for by the arbiters of what the elder generation shall be permitted to know. In the dim early periods, of which some memory lingers from before the War, an uncle was presumed to be lenient : the word connoted, or carried with it, the suggestion of a certain humorous indulgence. An aunt, especially a maiden aunt, was of all created things the least shock-absorbing. To-day your maiden aunt is either a doctor or a sanitary inspector, and in nine cases out of ten was a window- smashing suffragette : harder stuff than the uncle. Probably also the mother is, as a rule, the parent who has to act as a buffer and protect the sensibilities of the elder male. She, in her vocation, has had naturally a closer contact with the source of shocks ; for—need one really say it ?—it is the daughter to-day who does the administering of them. The whole male sex is still aghast and staggered by the spectacle of woman ranging loose ; and they are not pleased about it. Men liked to regulate the dose for themselves. They enjoyed being shocked, have always enjoyed it since the time of Aristophanes—for that matter, in all probability from the first syllable of unrecorded time ; and they have always been shocked about women, though by what precise trait in woman's conduct varied with the latitude, .the longitude and the lapse of centuries. Essentially, however, men settled what should shock. The shocking was what shocked men.- Women took the cue and were, as was expected of them, more shocked than their masters. It would have been shocking had they not been.
Nowadays woman settles all that for herself ; and perhaps for the first time in human history man is more shocked than he likes to be. He is forced to think seriously, and no one likes to think under compulsion. When a severe damsel, whose intact austerity no human being can fail to recognize, mentions that she has been reading this or that perversely indecent novel, the male elder can only suppress a gasp and realize in a spasm that the world has changed. These things occur just as indisputably as latch-keys. There is no use in saying that a young woman should not have a latch-key. She has it. This is a fact of life, and once a thing is that, it is imbecile to be shocked at it, though, indeed, many are actually and frequently shocked at life. The shocked male has to begin to ask himself, not whether it is shocking. that a young woman should read, say, Paul Morand, but whether it is shocking that he himself should do so. He must either contract greatly the limits of his shockability or give them an extension which it will be inconvenient, if not impossible, to maintain.
What, after all, is the shocking ? Certainly not the immoral. There was nothing immoral in articulating some of the many excellent Anglo-Saxon words, mostly monosyllables, which usage discouraged or prohibited. " Leg " was on the border-line, but certainly many were shocked, or felt it right to be, by the sudden explosion of this sound—at least with its human reference—in mixed company. " Flea " was risky to name, " bug " frankly indelicate. Reasons might be given for their avoidance, but why admit " cow " and exclude the feminine of " dog " ? (Vache, by the way, begins to be shocking in France.) This particular phase of sensibility, this swaddled delicacy of the ear, in our youth afforded a resource to literature, and there was no strong writer but made great play with "guts." Henley, perhaps, began it. Even still the elegantly nurtured female can startle with that noun, but she is reaching out after adjectives which had been exclusively a masculine prerogative—treading on the heels, in short, of the cultured male who came back from the trenches with a mouthful of words and oaths, not exactly strange, but unfamiliar in their new atmosphere. The desire to shock must be one of the ultimate constituents in human nature. Everybody, in all classes, is disposed at certain moments to epater lee bourgeois. Nobody is so refined, so genteel, so nice in thought and language, as to escape the temptation. Our mothers—the mothers of us old fogeys—used to be wilfully horrifying ; and a Victorian lady, by speaking of "a row," could achieve just as exquisite unfitness as her pretty granddaughter attains when she puts Mr. Shaw's Mrs. Campbell's Galatea's adjective after the article and before the noun ; for, of course, like all literary affectations, the shocking in speech soon exhausts its virtue of novelty, and the note must be continually forced. However, the elder genera- tiOn has to recognize that its young women, having achieved their emancipation, do like to try their tongues on strange vocables, exactly as young men did, and with just as much or as little moral damage. As a rule, too, it is only by accident that the older generation hear or overhear. The young of both sexes, comrades now at the University and elsewhere, are fully occupied in trying to shock one another : it is a game, and refusal to be shocked is part of the game. One clever youth the other day, after running through all the extravagances he could lay. his tongue to hi a -tete-a-tek, looked the young woman suddenly in the eyes and said, "I wonder what" (let us not be precise on the next two words) "you are thinking of me." "I am thinking how exactly like you are to everyone else," was the answer ; and a very excellent answer, too. It is only encouraging indelicacy to bridle and be disgusted. Woman is in charge now, and she, not man, will decide what is proper, what improper to be spoken, or spoken of.
And in all seriousness, we have made headway. A girl of to-day will discuss with her father what mother and daughter would have been shy to talk over even a generation ago ; and there is a helpfulness between opposite sexes which cannot be lent from man to man or woman to woman. It should not be available only in relations where the sex barrier is down. Even in ordinary friendship the young woman will now talk to the older man, as the young man sometimes, to his very great advantage, has in all periods talked to the older woman ; and for this novelty the world has probably reason to be thankful.
Nobody is likely to deny that things need readjust- ment, or that balance has been shaken. France saw with amazement the way in which England let its young women go abroad from the home—and foresaw with accuracy consequences which French mankind were quite simply not prepared to risk for their womenfolk. The change in these islands has been greater, the unloosening of restraints by far more revolutionary. We shall know better what to be shocked at in another ten or twenty years. For the moment all reactions of sensibility are impaired, the delicate springs bruised and fatigued. There are facts by far more shocking than any of the irregularities or indiscretions or even indecencies about which the word is oftenest used, and to which its use is far too closely limited ; and we went through a time in which really nobody except the poets retained their sense of outraged human decency. It has been so before ; and the greater the poet, the surer his reaction of disgust. Southey was shocked by the imagined memory of Blenheim, and he put his reaction into Old Kaspar's mouth. But Byron, not too nicely squeamish in other matters, spoke out his revolt against Waterloo ; no nimbus of glory dazzled him from seeing the essential squalor of that "crowning carnage," when "the recording angel threw his pen down in divine disgust, the page was all so smeared with blood and dust." No poet of Byron's calibre saw the Somme ; but poets enough saw it, and they told the world what it was really like. They alone, it would seem, felt how many sanctities were shattered. War, which abrogates the sanctions of certain primary sanctities, shakes, if it does not remove, so many others, that we have no right to be surprised if there is a general lessening of that fastidiousness which is to morality what the sense of honour is to principle. Allowances have to be made, and not for the young only, but for a whole generation ; they should include, at least , in retrospect, even our- selves. There is no use in being shocked at the things we have done, said, thought, felt—or failed to feel.
But it is well not to forget that a society or a person no longer able to be shocked has lost in this fastidiousness a quality which is akin to honour—which is indeed honour in another aspect ; not noisy, not querulous nor quarrel- some—for those in whom -disgust strikes deepest at a gross word or ugly action keep least cry about their sensibility—but an instinct .guiding conduct and judg- ment to avoidance, just -as surely as honour prompts
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