THE MODERN CALYPSO. T HE charm of surprise is potent in

this generation. The English world has conceived an unreasonable horror of the commonplace. In men, women, and books we desire the unexpected. We follow after wisdom, but refuse to recognise

it unless it is upside down. A conclusion not dislocated from its proper premises is regarded as a truism and rejected with scorn. We flirt in paradoxes ,and preach in motley. The result of a fashion is a type. Just now a new type of novel, a new type of essay, a new "type of play, commands our

admiration, and, most noticeable of all, a seemingly new type of woman. Is she pretty ? Oh dear no ! Prettiness is commonplace. Her features—except, perhaps, her eyes—

contradict individually their whole effect, which is that of beauty, and so create a sense of surprise. Is she good Probably. She does not parade the fact, but she certainly takes a keen, if spasmodic, interest in the problems or the poor, seeking sometimes, even at the cost of a small sacrifice, to share their experiences, creating intervals in the luxury of her ordinary life, engaging, indeed, in a search for novelty, which she often mistakes for sympathy. Is she proud ? Not exactly; but she has a great opinion of herself and of her power. The old armour is replaced by new ammunition, and her victims are not without a stimulating sense of fear.

Her grandmother charmed by few words, but these few were calculated to betray her character. This -woman of to-day charms by many, all of which are calculated to conceal' it.

Are her eyes, then, the windows of her soul ? By no means. But they are not expressionless eyes. They glow and cloua like magic stones marked with a cryptic message. Is she clever ? A man will say "Yes," a woman " No, " partly because they assign rather different meanings to the word, and pat:tl$r because few people are socially clever unless they try. It is easiest to explain her mental capacities by negatives. No man has ever found her to be a bore. She can talk well about people, and has the gift of characterisation. In the thin

medium of pellucid satire she can paint a picture, or nab& catch a likeness, with remarkable skill ; and long before her

art begins to pall upon her critic she will shut her portfolio, and open a conversational variety show. Whatever is said by her interlocutor interests her keenly, but she is capable of feigning ignorance that she may pretend quickness and of disguising reason in order to display intuition. She knows how to introduce the personal element into the differ- ential calculus, to sting with a compliment and caress with a word of blame. She has what the Early Victorian women were without, a certain recreative force. She knows the

bracing effect of shock upon the wits, and though she may be more superficial and less sympathetic than the women of a former generation, she is far more intimate, and consequently more of a comrade. Shyness has no part in her composition. No opinions nor convictions are safe from her fingers, and she will trifle with a man's prejudices till he is in danger of losing them, and fears lest along with them he should lose some of those cherished possessions of mind of which prejudices are

but current conversational tokens. But if she never lets him rest mentally or emotionally, if he is always being made to laugh or to wince, to wonder, admire, or condemn, there is a sense in which the modern woman keeps no man on the stretch. She puts him off his guard now and then, to his 'complete satisfaction. He is welcome to stand at ease in all sincerity, as he never could with Amelia. She cherishes no feminine picture of the ideal man to which those who would please her must try to conform.

She speaks simply to entertain. Of course, she is inconsequent; but there is a charm about inconsequence like the charm of a winding path. When we talk to this woman we do not know exactly where we are going. We lose our mental bearings, and are content to forget the compass-points of common-sense. She knows there is a wild region in every man's imagination, a region outside that which is policed by convention, where the shibboleths of society are not spoken, where ideas are not sorted, consistency is not essential, and the clash of contrast charms more than all the harmonies of the civilised world. Keats showed us a glimpse of this region when be wrote :—

" I love to mark sad faces in fair weather, And hear a merry laugh amid the thunder; Fair and foul I love together,

Meadows sweet where flames are under, ' And a-giggle at a wonder; Visage sage at pantomime; Funeral and steeple chime, Infant playing with a skull, Morning fair and shipwrecked hull ; Nightshade with the woodbine kissing, Serpents in red roses hissing; Cleopatra regal dressed With the aspic at her breast; Domino-, music sad,

Both together, sane and mad."

'Keats speaks of music, and makes us remember that modern music has something in common with much of the conversa- tion of this lady. It holds the listener in his place to hear it out, though he wonders why, and stirs him most when he is most assured that if the spell is not soon broken he will be either deafened or demented.

In a sense she is more amusing, not only than her grand- mother ever aspired to be, but than she ever succeeded in being. But perhaps it would be more true, in comparing the two, to say she is the more distracting. She has none of the trenchant shrewdness which delighted before she was born, and will delight when she is as dead as Amelia. Her talk cuts no knots ; her object is to tie them. Her humour owes its piquancy to some oblique quality in her mind which an eighteenth-century poet has told us breaks sometimes reason's "steady light," and makes all things appear other than they are. For all her intellectual abandon, however, she is not foolish in the affairs of everyday life. If she spends more money than she ought, it is because she craves more than she ought for the things which money will buy, not because her mind is confused by figures. Pounds, shillings, and pence have, upon the other hand, a wonderfully clearing effect upon her brain. But if she is worldly, she is also transcendental, or she would not belong to the twentieth century. Nothing interests her more than the power of the mind over the body. In the intervals between bouts of high spirits—high spirits which lead her to assume in kaleidoscopic rotation the role of the child, the actress, and the factory girl—she suffers from the feverish effects of modern doubt. Mistaking for religious emotion a certain self-consciousness of soul, she will allow any charlatan to exact from her, not much money, but a fluctuating credulity which she believes more spiritual than her grandmother's established faith.

. Is she likely to modify the Englishman's ideal of an Englishwoman? Heaven forbid ! Is she then only the spirit of a present-day fashion? The word "spirit" is misused in such a connection. She is simply the incarnation of a phase. There have been no new women since Eve. If we go back nearly two hundred years, we shall find her portrait in Pope

"Twas thus Calypso once each heart alarmed, Awed without virtue, without beauty charmed ; Her tongue bewitched as oddly as her eyes, Less wit than mimic, more a wit than wise. Strange graces still, and stranger flights she had, Was just not ugly, and was just not mad ; Yet ne'er so sure our passion to create, As when she touched the brink of all we hate."