Veronica nor Hilda Lessways is the normal representative of the sex. About the morality of Mr. Wells's and Mr. Bennett's books, there are probably a hundred opinions. One's own present quarrel with them is not that they are bad morals, but that they are bad biology.

TABU AND TEMPERAMENT

W

HEN, I wonder, did the word "temperament" come into fashion with us?

We can hardly have got it from the French, for the French mean by it something very different from what we do; though it is just possible that we did get it from them, and have merely Bowdlerized the term. At all events, whatever it stands for, it long since became a great social asset for women, and a great social excuse for men. Perhaps it came in when we discovered that artists were human beings. At least, for many years, we never praised an artist without using the word. It does not necessarily imply "charm," for people have charm irrespective of temperament, and temperament irrespective of charm. It is something that the Philistine never has: that we know. But what, by all the gods of clarity, does it mean?

It means, I fancy, in one degree or another, the personal revolt against convention. The individual who was "different," who did not let his inhibitions interfere with his epigrams, who was not afraid to express himself, who hated clichés of every kind-how well we know that figure in motley, who turned every occa

sion into a fancy-dress ball! All the inconvenient things he did were forgiven him, for the sake of the amusing things he said. Indeed, we hardly stopped to realize that his fascination was largely a matter of vocabulary. Now it is one thing to sow your wild oats in talk, and quite another to live by your own kaleidoscopic paradoxes. The people who frowned on the manifestations of "temperament" were merely those logical creatures who believed that if you expressed your opinions regardless of other people's feelings, you probably meant what you said. They did not know the pathology of epigram, the basic truth of which is that wordintoxicated people express an opinion long before they dream of holding it. They say what they think, whether they think it or not. Only, if you talk with incessant variety about what ought to be done, and then never do any of the wild things you recommend, you become in the end perfectly powerless as a foe of convention.

This tactical fact the unconventional folk have at last become aware of; and, accordingly, hostility to convention is ceasing somewhat to take itself out in phrases. Conventions, at the present moment, are really menaced. The most striking sign of this is that people are now making unconventionality a social virtue, instead of an unsocial vice. The switches have been opened, and the laden trains must take their chance of a destination.

The praise of temperament, I verily believe, was the entering wedge. But whatever the first cause, "conventional" is certainly in bad odor as an epithet. And this is really an interesting phenomenon, worth investigating. What is it that makes it a term of reproach? Why must you never say it about your dearest friend? Why must you contradict, in a shocked tone, if your dearest friend is said to be conventional ? Most of my best friends are conventional, I am glad to say; but even I should never think of describing them to others thus.

Conventional people are supposed to lack intelligence the power to think for themselves. (It seems to be pretty well taken for granted that you cannot think for yourself, and decide to think what the majority of your kind thinks. If you agree with the majority, it must be because you have no mental processes.) They are felt to lack charm: to have nothing unexpected and delightful to give you. And, nowadays, they are (paradoxes are popular) supposed to be perilous to society, because they are immovable, because they do not march with the times, because they cling to conservative conceptions while the parties of progress are re-making the world. All these reproaches are, at present, conveyed in the one word.

Now it is a great mistake to confound conventionality with simplicity-with that simplicity which indicates a brain inadequate to

dealing with subtleties; or to confound "temperament" and unconventionality with a highly organized nature. The anthropologists have exploded all that. I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies. I doubt if the anthropologists have any more perspective than other scientists. I am as near being an old Augustan as any twentieth-century observer can be: "nihil humani," etc. But, for God's sake, let it be human! Palæontology is a poor substitute for history. No: I do not love any scientists, even the anthropologists. But I do think we ought to be grateful to them for proving to us that primitive people are a hundred times as conventional as we; and that their codes are almost too complicated for European minds to master. If any one is still under the dominance of Rousseau, Chateaubriand et Cie., I wish he would sit down impartially before Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's exposition of group-marriage among the Australian aborigines. If, in three hours, he knows whom, supposing he were a Matthurie of the dingo totem, he could marry without incurring punishment, or even the death penalty, he had better take his subtlety into Central Australia: he is quite wasted on civilization.

Some one may retort that I am not exactly