Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 239
But nowadays the favorite name for a heroine seems to be one of those dignified, double-gendered, half impossible designations that might mean either a girl or a man or a horse, — as, for example, Joyce, Loïs, Dyce, or something of that sort.
Having got her described and named the next difficulty with the heroine is to dress her. This is the hardest of all. The novelist of two generations ago did it very simply. They always clothed their heroine in “old clinging stuff.” That was all. What it is or where you buy it, I don’t know. But the old-fashioned heroine always wore it on great occasions. If she was poor, — a governess, for instance, — she got it out of a box left her by her mother. If she was rich she went out and bought it and it was then called “priceless old clinging stuff.” And she made her appearance in it thus:
“As Margaret descended the broad stairways, dressed simply in beautiful old white clinging stuff which clung to her as she descended, all eyes turned to gaze at her in enraptured admiration. ‘Great Heavens,’ said the young Duke, ‘who is she?’ ”
But that won’t do now. These are the days of illustrated fashion magazines and the readers, the female readers at any rate, want to know what it was that she really had on, and won’t be put off any longer with that clinging stuff. Nor will it do to say that she was “dressed all in flaming red,” or that “she appeared dressed in opalescent pink, shot with blue,” or “half shot with something concealed below.” Even if her appearance was half shot, the reader wants to know all about it and where she got it.
Only women writers can really deal with this situation, and unfortunately, nine out of ten novels are written by men. All that a man can do is to reach out for a fashion magazine, snatch out a handful of technical terms and throw them at the heroine, — thus:
“As Loïs gayly slid down the bannisters of the staircase, her appearance attracted all eyes. She wore a dainty georgette of limousine tucked over a brassière of deep blue and held in place with a ceinture of alligator hide with crystalline insertions. ‘Great Heavens,’ said the young Duke, ‘who is she?’ ”
With that, her figure and her name and her dress are fairly well settled. But worse remains, — her mind? What is, what ought to be, the mind of an attractive woman? Should she know anything or just nothing?
The earlier writers were all for the nothing. With them the less the heroine knew the bigger hit she made. Witness this description taken right out of an old book, but easily recognizable.
“Caroline Cowslip had been brought up in the greatest simplicity. Reared in the seclusion of an old-fashioned rectory it was probable that she was more simple than any girl within a radius of ten miles. To this charm of a native simplicity was added a total lack of education and an entire absence of worldly knowledge. The father, the good old rector, had at last gone to his rest, leaving Caroline alone in the world.”
In these older books, the idea was that this kind of start would land Caroline in all kinds of interesting trouble.
But to-day this, too, is changed. The heroine can’t any longer be made ignorant because this gives offense to all women readers: on the other hand, it doesn’t do to have her know too much, or else the men object to her. The only way to get round it is for the author to keep on declaring that Loïs has a “limpid mind,” and to speak of “the girl’s clear intelligence” but not to let her work it too hard.
Here is something of the touch that is needed.
“Loïs sat silent, her hands clasped about her knee and her eyes half closed, while Dangerfield explained to her all the intricacies of the situation.
“ ’I begin to see,’ she murmured.
“Dangerfield, relying always on the limpid intelligence of the girl’s limpid intellect, continued in the same quiet way to lay before her all the tangled factors in the weg of calculation which made up — what he was talking about.
“At the end he stopped— ‘And you can trust me?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ she murmured as she rose, ‘and now I must go home and think!’ ”
By that means, of course, she has it pretty well put all over Dangerfield and the reader too. In reality she is probably just about on the same level as Caroline. But when she says she must “go home and think,” let her go by all means. It is what she needs.
Bed-time Stories for Grown-up People WITH APOLOGIES TO OUR BEST CHILDREN’S WRITERS
THERE HAS COME into being lately a new and very charming school of literature which deals with the animals, not as they are but as they might be. Skinko the Skunk turns into a merry little companion, a little saucy at times but without malice. Warto the Toad sits complacently under a broad leaf, talking with Squirmo the Worm. Old Mr. Hawk hovers gently overhead looking kindly down and wondering whom to eat. The whole animal kingdom is thus suffused with such a soft and drowsy atmosphere that the little children lay their tired heads on the pillow and go to sleep dreaming of it.
Isn’t it beautiful? And what a pity it seems that we can’t do the same for grown-up life. The only part of our modern newspaper that breathes out this entrancing atmosphere of universal happiness is that little corner of the children’s page. All the rest of it is filled with battles and crimes, with murder and sudden death.
Come, let us see if we can’t do something to straighten this out. Let us take a piece of news out of a modern journal, the first to hand and the first random item we see, and try if we cannot rewrite it with the human breadth of kindliness of a bed-time story. Here, what is this? This looks like the kind of thing that we want:
DARING BURGLARY IN RESIDENTIAL DISTRICT
DESPERATE CRIMINAL DANGEROUSLY WOUNDED
Friday, April 1. — Last night at an advanced hour burglars broke into the cellars of the residence of Mr. Surplus Overall, the well-known stockbroker, and were in the act of ransacking the house when a sudden alarm brought the police to the scene. After a fusillade of shots had been exchanged the burglars made good their escape with the exception of one man who was desperately wounded in the fray and captured. The apparent motive was robbery.
But, dear me! that sounds altogether too harsh, too brutal! It is a criminal world indeed in which such things as that can happen. Let us see if we can rewrite it, so as to give it that soft and gentle touch of the bed-time story.
Try it like this:
Away down in the crowded part of the city lives Fuzzy the Burglar in a hole of his own that nobody else can find. He has an old fur coat with the fur nearly all eaten off of it and so he is called Fuzzy. He looks very different from Fatto the Capitalist whose sleek fur coat glistens and ripples as he walks, and very different from Stocko the Broker who is all covered with rich fur and silk lining from his neck to his feet and his paws.
But Fuzzy hardly ever sees these because he doesn’t get out by day but lies round in his hole and sleeps and only goes out at night. Fuzzy sees better at night. Sometimes he wanders at night away up into the part of the town where Fatto and Stocko live and where there are so many trees that it is like a wood. Often as he goes past their houses, Fuzzy’s quick nose catches delicious smells wafted from the kitchens and he knows that Fatto or Stocko is having a feast, with nuts and elderberry wine. My! how Fuzzy would like to be in that feast! Only of course he can’t be in it because Fatto and Stocko won’t let him come in.
In fact, in order to keep Fuzzy out they have Coppo the Cop walking up and down in the street outside, under the electric light, just to keep Fuzzy away:
Coppo likes to walk under the light because then everybody can see him and see what a sleek coat he has and how plump he is. Now and again Coppo will stand still and swing his arms so as to beat himself with his big paws: partly because it is cold and partly because his instinct tells him that that is good for his circulation. If Coppo didn’t beat his arms like this perhaps he wouldn’t have any circulation at all.
Now when Coppo stands on his beat he sees all the people that live along his street come home in their limousine cars, and of course he knows them all. And when he sees Stocko the Broker go by, he says to himself, “There’s Stocko coming home”; and he puts his paw up to his hat to show that he knows him. Then presently he sees Skin the Lawyer, and Scratchy the Notary drive home and at last he sees Clubbo, the Club man, come crawling home along the edge of the sidewalk, because it is Clubbo’s instinct not to trust the sidewalk in case it should rise up and hit him. And at last Coppo says, “They are all home.” And he goes and stands under the lamp and leans against the lamp post because he knows that that is good for his back. And he wishes that he was at home too. Away down in the deeper part of the city Coppo has a mate and a lot of little Coppos all round and plump like himself. But of course he can’t be at home with them because he has to stay under the lamp post and then if anything has happened he can run off as fast as he can on his fat legs to the Station House and say, “Something has happened!”
But all the time while Coppo is standing there he is really watching for Fuzzy the Burglar. And he says to himself, “I wonder where Fuzzy is to-night,” and, “I wonder what Fuzzy is doing?” He looks up and down the street and towards all the dark corners-and thinks “perhaps Fuzzy is in there.”
So presently, on the night we are going to talk about, Fuzzy came along the street, only he didn’t come along openly and heartily, like Fatto the Capitalist and Stocko the Broker. He came sneaking along and sneaking along and when he saw Coppo looking he stood quite still in the shadow and growled to himself and showed his teeth with all the fur on his old coat standing up with apprehension.
And presently when Coppo was looking the wrong way Fuzzy got right past him and into the little dark lane beside Stocko’s house. There he waited a little while to see that all was still and then he knelt down in the darkness beside one of the cellar windows and began scratching at it with his clever little paws till presently the windows pushed open and Fuzzy slipped quietly down into the cellar.
My! But it was dark down there! At first Fuzzy could hardly see anything at all but presently when his eyes began to get used to it he saw that he was in a room with a lot of coal in it. Fuzzy’s instinct told him that this must be the coal room with the coal for the furnace that keeps Stocko warm while he is eating nuts and drinking elderberry wine. Fuzzy knew that there must be a door somewhere and a flight of stairs to lead up into the house. So he crawled round quietly until he found the stairs and then he waited and waited and he pricked up his ears and he listened and listened, because he wanted to find out whether Stocko was asleep. If he was, then perhaps he might have left his big gold watch somewhere on a table, or perhaps he had left ten dollars on a chair, or perhaps his long slick fur coat was hanging in the hall.
Fuzzy thought of all these things as he sat there in the dark and he licked his chops when he pictured himself going home to his hole in the fur coat, with ten dollars in the pockets and the big gold watch and chain round his neck.
Only Fuzzy couldn’t be quite sure that Stocko was asleep! Sometimes he thought he heard him snoring and then he thought perhaps he heard him still moving about. So he waited and waited.
But Stocko wasn’t asleep. He was upstairs sitting in his dressing gown at his library table counting his money. He was counting it because he wasn’t quite sure whether he had made ten thousand dollars that day or ten thousand dollars and fifty cents; and he was sitting up to see which it was.
So at last Fuzzy made up his mind to crawl on up the stairs. In one hand he had a little wee light that he could shut on and off, and in his breast pocket was a cute little automatic pistol.
Fuzzy climbed higher and higher: and then just as he got near the top of the cellar stairs, he knocked against a lump of coal lying on the steps and away it went bump! bump! bump! all down the steps. And just at that minute Fuzzy heard a sharp wow! wow! wow! and he knew that dear little Helpup, Stocko’s fox terrier, had heard the noise and was trying to wake the house. Fuzzy would like to have taken his automatic pistol and made a hole through dear little Helpup from one end of him to the other. But he didn’t dare do it and so he turned and rushed down the stairs again and seemed to fall over everything and shouted, “Who’s there!” And somewhere in another set of rooms of the basement Booze the Butler woke up and began putting on his evening tie again and bells rang and the maids screamed and Fuzzy ran up and down among the coals trying to find the friendly window and he couldn’t.
Then Stocko put his head out of the window and shouted out to Coppo, “Hi, there! thieves! robbers!!” and Coppo who had hardly been asleep at all called out, “All right, sir,” and drew his big revolver and began firing it in all directions and hitting the houses and the trees and shooting at the people who put their heads out of windows.
And in less than no time other Coppos came running along, and then wagonfuls of them arrived with gongs and bells. And when poor Fuzzy came crawling out of the cellar window they all fired their guns at him as often as they could shoot, and one of them actually almost hit him in the foot and at any rate tore the heel of his old boot off.
So when the Cops at last got Fuzzy and put him in a wagon like a cage and sat in it with him, Fuzzy was quite sulky. At first he wouldn’t talk at all but all the Cops just laughed and one of them gave Fuzzy a drink of huckleberry tea that he had in a flask (because all Cops like huckleberry tea). So Fuzzy cheered up presently and when the Cops told him he would get two years in the Jug he didn’t mind so very much but he only laughed. Because the Cops really like Fuzzy and Fuzzy likes the Cops and they both think one another real men.
Only Fuzzy made up his mind that after this he would never, never speak to Helpup again.
Softening the Stories for the Children BUT DON’T DO IT: THEY PREFER THEM ROUGH
“WHAT IS THE story that you are reading, Peggy?” I asked of a wide-eyed child of eight, who sat buried in a story book.
“Little Red Riding Hood,” she answered.
“Have you come to the part,” I asked, “where the grandmother gets eaten?”
“She didn’t get eaten!” the child protested in surprise.
“Yes, — the wolf comes to her cottage and knocks at the door and she thinks that it is Little Red Riding Hood and opens the door and the wolf eats her.”
She shook her head.
“That’s not it at all in this book,” she said.
So I took a look at the page before her and I read:
“Then the wolf pushed open the door of the cottage and rushed in but the grandmother was not there as she happened not to be at home.”
Exactly! The grandmother, being a truly up-to-date grandmother, was probably out on the golf links, or playing bridge with a few other grandmothers like herself.
At any rate she was not there and so she escaped getting eaten by the wolf. In other words, Little Red Riding Hood, like all the good old stories that have come down from the bad old times, is having to give way to the tendencies of a human age. It is supposed to be too horrible for the children to read. The awful fate of the grandmother, chawed up by the wolf, or, no, swallowed whole like a Malpecque oyster, is too terrible for them to hear. So the story, like a hundred other stories and pictures, has got to be censored, reëdited, and incidentally, spoiled.
All of which rests on a fundamental error as to literature and as to children. There is no need to soften down a story for them. They like it rough.
“In the real story,” I said to the little girl, “the grandmother was at home, and the wolf rushed in and ate her in one mouthful!”
“Oh! that’s much better!” she exclaimed.
“And then, afterwards, when the hunters came in, they killed the wolf and cut his stomach open and the grandmother jumped out and was saved!”
“Oh, isn’t that splendid!” cried the child.
In other words, all the terror that grown-up people see in this sort of story is there for grown-up people only. The children look clean over it, or past it, or under it. In reality, the vision of the grandmother feebly defending herself against the savage beast, or perhaps leaping round the room to get away from him, and jumping on top of the grandfather’s clock — is either horrible, or weird, or pathetic, or even comic, as we may happen to see it. But to the children it is just a story — and a good one — that’s all.
And all the old stories are the same! Consider Jack the Giant-Killer. What a conglomeration of weeping and wailing, of people shut into low dungeons, of murder, of sudden death, of blood, and of horror! Jack, having inveigled an enormous giant into eating an enormous quantity of porridge, then rips him up the stomach with a huge sword! What a mess!
But it doesn’t disturb Jack or his young readers one iota. In fact, Jack is off at once with his young readers trailing eagerly after him, in order to cut off at one blow the three huge heads of a three-headed giant and make a worse mess still.
From the fairy stories and the giant stories the children presently pass on — quite unscathed as I see it — to the higher range of the blood-and-thunder stories of the pirates and the battles. Here again the reality, for the grown-up mind that can see it, is terrible and gruesome; but never so for the boys and girls who see in it only the pleasant adventure and bright diversity.
Take, for instance, this familiar scene as it appears and reappears in the history of Jack Daredevil, or Ned Fearnothing, or any of those noble boys who go to tea, in books, at the age of fourteen and retire, as admirals, at twenty-two.
