THE RAGE TO LIVE.
THE rage to live is no new thing. It was Pope who first used the expression. Flavia, who personifies it, stands near to Calypso in that dream of fashionable women with which he terrified and delighted his own generation. Whatever Pope's place as a poet, as a satirist and student of men and manners be is among the immortals, and it would be impertinent to apologise for quoting him twice in a fortnight. The eighteenth-century Flavia asks of her stars to give "The mighty blessing while we live to live.' " How many women to-day offer the same petition to the same false gods ? The Flavia,who lives in the reign of Sing Edward, like the Flavia who lived in the reign of George I., is entranced by the consideration of herself. Filled with the exquisite consciousness of her own vitality, she resolves to give her time to the sharpening of all pleasurable perceptions. The delicate mechanism of tier mind delights her. All her energies are directed to satisiying the complex wants and wishes of which her personality is compounded. Continuous effort brings every function into play. A spurious sense of duty is created by the strain. The powers she has invoked grant her the blessing she strives for. Inclination takes the place of aspiration, and succeeds to something of its dynamic force. With this change all is changed. Courage, that . constant companion of energy, becomes recklessness. Life itself is valuable only for the sensations that can be packed into it. Benevolence is transformed into a love of power, candour into effrontery. The motive force of industry is used to promote the organisation of frivolity. Domesticity becomes synonymous with dulness, and is regarded as a mere relic of middle-class monotony.
Flavia does not live the same life outwardly as did her prototype of two hundred years ago. The pace of the pleasure- seeker has increased in the ratio of a motor-car to a bath-chair. Science and art have joined forces to accelerate the speed. Could Flavia have gone to sleep in the eighteenth century and waked in the twentieth, she would have been astonished at all the new facilities offered her for "living her life." A telephone brings the voices of her friends to her bed-head. Electricity whirls her to her dressmaker, her jeweller, or her fortune- teller, or right away to her country club in less time than it took the earlier lady to cross the town. Music and pictures court her attention at every turn; a superabundance of books lies on her table, offering to minister to her fancy, her curiosity, or her emotion. Catastrophes and cataclysms from the other side of the world are retailed by the newspapers for her entertainment within a few hours of their taking place. The hardships of travel have ceased to exist. However the rage to live might possess Pope's heroine, she was obliged to live somewhere. The modern Flavia lives everywhere. She enjoys a physical luxury beyond the wildest dreams of the early Georges. Such luxury, however, means little to those who are used to it. It is perhaps the least lasting of all delights. The desire to get it gives almost instant way to the desire to
increase it. Increased beyond a point it becomes a burden, and it is only valued when it is not there. Flavia knows well that money can buy better things,—for instance, power. She values her money largely because it enables her to
play Providence, and as she thus disports herself we see her best side. The man or woman who loves power only in order to be cruel has but a narrow conception of its delights. go normal woman has so restricted an appreciation of pleasure.
A woman's love of power is connected with her love of her children—by whose helplessness it has been fostered for countless generations—and consequently with the milk of human kindness. Flavia would leave a delicious drop of life's cup undrunk if she never tasted gratitude. It is sweeter than revenge. But she neglects neither. Her enemies get no quarter at her hands. If she can, she will inflict the last social penalty, the one thing she could not bear herself. To be out of the swim ! Flavia shudders as she pursues her victim, for is it not social death ? She will defend her friends, however, and work hard to avert the just reward even of the worst deed, if only she likes the sinner, and, above all, if the sinner will confess. Her kindnesses are done well. There is no real pleasure to be got out of a botched job. Where she cannot help she does not pity. To do so strikes her as the acme of folly. She determines to disbelieve in any misery which might depress her. Those hopeless compassionate pains which so many men and women bear silently all their lives never touch her.
She regards such men and women as sentimentalists, and does not know that they alone may be truly described as matter-of- fact. But though Flavia is good to her friends, the stray observer who.m chance brings within her orbit would be very likely not to think so. She has a great feeling for a form of
sincerity and very little appreciation of politeness. To hurt no one's feelings requires continual thought. It is a pre- occupation not permissible to those who have set out to run the race for pleasure in real earnest. She enjoys the tilt of rather rough speech, and had she been sensitive she would not have got many yards beyond the starting-point. In conversation she is exceedingly frank, lightly regarding that reasonable reticence maintained by the greater number of Englishwomen, a reticence which has hitherto preserved society as a whole from all arbitrary rules about what may and may not be said. But Flavia's mind is not large enough to embrace con- siderations of the common good. Part of her want of imagination is no doubt due to the narrow circle in which she lives. She does not in any true sense mix with the world. Her friends and her enemies are alike her intimates, and they are all the same sort of people. A life lived wholly among intimates tends to a low level of conversation, and to shut off the larger common grounds. The selective prin- ciple on which her circle is formed is a narrower one than the old principle of birth. People of equal birth may have widely different tastes, talents, and fortunes; but a society whose items come together because they resemble one another in tlie rage to live and in having the money to indulge their madness can hardly be likely to increase one another's width of mina. Yet, of course, neither Pope's Flavia nor ours is stupid.
"Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please; With too much spirit to be e'er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught;
With too much thinking to have common thought"—
wrote the poet of the lady as he knew her, and certainly his words might have been written to-day. The effort to be
always cheery is an awful effort. There are moments when even liqueurs fail to lighten the labour. Flavia must be always
on the alert. It is impossible that she should ever think out any question, yet she must have something to say about almost all. In the true spirit of the gambler who will not work for what he wants, she trusts to winning the ideas of her inter- locutors by reckless play with her own. Her wits are always ready for use, but she comes to no conclusions. Her words are as pointed arrows, yet more and more often they miss the mark. Her thinking tends always to eccentricity, as is the inevitable result of the constant sacrifice of sense to sensation. Flavia had always a liking to play to the gallery, and lately that liking has increased upon her. The luxury of being looked at by those of her own set, with a few men of genius from the outside to tell the world of her doings, satisfied the old Flavia. It does not satisfy the new. Her audience gets larger and larger. Just now it is commensurate with the circulation of the daily Press. She requires a reporter where • Pope's heroine was satisfied with a poet. Flavia is seen from afar, but her own vision is still bounded by the confines of a forced and cultivated cabbage-leaf. She hurries on her round pursued by the swifter spirit of the time. Presently her place will know her no more, and she will be with the old Flavia behind the scenes. The audience rubs its eyes. What has happened,—a revolution ? No; something far more irre- sistible,—a reaction. Some day the call-bell of fashion will bring on a still newer Flavia, who will again- " Purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live."
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