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Idle Ideas in 1905
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Are We As Interesting As We Think We Are?
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About meeting people at parties, introductions, expectations, and more - it's hilarious without being laboured, and seems like one is simply hearing the author tell about all this in a relaxed setting personally.
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Should Women Be Beautiful?
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"Pretty women are going to have a hard time of it later on. Hitherto, they have had things far too much their own way. In the future there are going to be no pretty girls, for the simple reason there will be no plain girls against which to contrast them."
It's unclear if he means only a makeover or drastic surgeries, but either way, the future of what he wrote over a century ago is here, both literally and in the sense of what he writes.
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When Is The Best Time To Be Merry?
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Here the author is ralking of what he, and perhaps the brits generally, seem to call - at least in his time - King Carnival.
Having lived in Germany a while, we know of it as Fasching, and were told it's not really different from Halloween, celebrated in U.S. on October 31st, but in Germany it last through the winter, from All Souls' Day on November 1st on to through February, and while one can technically go revelling the whole time, in reality every town generally fixes a day or so in February to do so, for the whole town and any visitors. So they deal with the dark months by revelling in dark spirits and dress up as foxes and adorn their cars with little pigs that look ferocious.
The author begins by saying he could improve Europe, and describes a little what's wrong with the carnival, but generally it's fun description. He has no clue about the dark spirits coming out.
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Do We Lie A-Bed Too Late?
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Jerome K. Jerome talks of rising early and seeing the city at dawn, but much more - of ragpickers, for instance, and seamstresses. Do they - ragpickers - still exist, one wonders. In poorer lands, in all likelihood, but surely not in Europe?
Reminds one of what one saw and heard and read in Germany. On one hand the locals are very proud they have no poverty as, for example, they have witnessed in L.A. and other cities of U.S., they inform one. On the other hand there are young people who beg at train stations at rush hours, pretending to be starving, foaming at the mouth and about to faint; one is frightened into giving a Deutsche Mark, which then the girl rushes to her boyfriend a little distance away, she's not fainting or foaming any more, it was for drugs.
When told, the neighbours inform one never to give, because these unemployed young are very well provided and prefer to not work. The neighbours tell why - it's not their fault they cannot become managers because they are not educated enough to get engineeringdegrees, like the foreigners temporarily employed in Germany.
One is infuriated at the sentiment against the foreigners and points out that education in Germany is free, and if they don't work for a degree as people of other countries do, it's hardly the foreigners at fault! Perhaps they could do housecleaning, gardening, sweeping streets?
Then one reads about German resentment against Polish workers in asparagus farming at the border, who live cheaply in Poland and work in Germany for better wages - but Germans refuse to do that work, because it's hard, and unemployment pays better.
So they find hating non-Germans more fun than working.
Jerome K. Jerome describes poor of the cities doing business early in the morning, buying and selling and haggling and saving pennies.
"One would they were better treated; alas! their owners, likewise, are overworked and underfed, housed in kennels no better. But if the majority in every society were not overworked and underfed and meanly housed, why, then the minority could not be underworked and overfed and housed luxuriously. But this is talk to which no respectable reader can be expected to listen."
In his days it was still colonial empires rising, and he's only looking at the poor of European cities, not of the lands they exploit.
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Should Married Men Play Golf?
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The author proceeds, after describing a couple on honeymoon in Scotland - when the groom forgot about their plan, being a golfer - to describe curious shorcomings of sport in Europe, particularly in France. He zeroes on tennis.
"I suppose it is the continental sky. It is so blue, so beautiful; it naturally attracts one. Anyhow, the fact remains that most tennis players on the Continent, whether English or foreign, have a tendency to aim the ball direct at Heaven. At an English club in Switzerland there existed in my days a young Englishman who was really a wonderful player. To get the ball past him was almost an impossibility. It was his return that was weak. He only had one stroke; the ball went a hundred feet or so into the air and descended in his opponent's court. The other man would stand watching it, a little speck in the Heavens, growing gradually bigger and bigger as it neared the earth. Newcomers would chatter to him, thinking he had detected a balloon or an eagle. He would wave them aside, explain to them that he would talk to them later, after the arrival of the ball. It would fall with a thud at his feet, rise another twenty yards or so and again descend. When it was at the proper height he would hit it back over the net, and the next moment it would be mounting the sky again. At tournaments I have seen that young man, with tears in his eyes, pleading to be given an umpire. Every umpire had fled. They hid behind trees, borrowed silk hats and umbrellas and pretended they were visitors—any device, however mean, to avoid the task of umpiring for that young man. Provided his opponent did not go to sleep or get cramp, one game might last all day. Anyone could return his balls; but, as I have said, to get a ball past him was almost an impossibility. He invariably won; the other man, after an hour or so, would get mad and try to lose. It was his only chance of dinner."
Thence, he returns to describing the tennis courts and its wealthy spectators in Europe being surrounded by small farms where poor emaciated families are visible plowing the field, without an ox or any other help.
"It is Anatole France, I think, who says: Society is based upon the patience of the poor."
It's startling to recall that this was, as the title says, 1905, the Russian revolution was around the corner, and even WWI was nearly a decade in future; royals were in charge everywhere in Europe except France, and society wasn't used to the changed thinking about humanity that came later; it was then only some thinkers that felt this way, and pointing out humanity of poor wasnt a sanctimonious routine practiced by bored insincere socialites. That Jerome K. Jerome was one of the revolutionary thinkers is the surprise, since an sverage reader is only familiar with his Three Men books usually.
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Are Early Marriages A Mistake?
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Nesting, swallows, sparrows, and the author.
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Do Writers Write Too Much?
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""Imagine to yourself, dear reader, an exquisite and gracious creature of five feet three. Her golden hair of that peculiar shade"—here would follow directions enabling the reader to work it out for himself. He was to pour some particular wine into some particular sort of glass, and wave it about before some particular sort of a light. Or he was to get up at five o'clock on a March morning and go into a wood. In this way he could satisfy himself as to the particular shade of gold the heroine's hair might happen to be. If he were a careless or lazy reader he could save himself time and trouble by taking the author's word for it. Many of them did.
""Her eyes!" They were invariably deep and liquid. They had to be pretty deep to hold all the odds and ends that were hidden in them; sunlight and shadow, mischief, unsuspected possibilities, assorted emotions, strange wild yearnings. Anything we didn't know where else to put we said was hidden in her eyes."
"To properly understand her complexion you were expected to provide yourself with a collection of assorted fruits and flowers. There are seasons in the year when it must have been difficult for the conscientious reader to have made sure of her complexion. Possibly it was for this purpose that wax flowers and fruit, carefully kept from the dust under glass cases, were common objects in former times upon the tables of the cultured."
But the author finds that coming across a serialised novel's seventh chapter in a newspaper without having read the first six isnt a problem, because a sub-editor has provided compact summaries.
"My fear is lest this sort of thing shall lead to a demand on the part of the public for condensed novels. What busy man is going to spend a week of evenings reading a book when a nice kind sub-editor is prepared in five minutes to tell him what it is all about!
"Then there will come a day—I feel it—when the business-like Editor will say to himself: "What in thunder is the sense of my paying one man to write a story of sixty thousand words and another man to read it and tell it again in sixteen hundred!""
"And what is to become of us writers if this is to be the new fashion in literature? We are paid by the length of our manuscript at rates from half-a-crown a thousand words, and upwards. In the case of fellows like Doyle and Kipling I am told it runs into pounds. How are we to live on novels the serial rights of which to most of us will work out at four and nine-pence.
"It can't be done. It is no good telling me you can see no reason why we should live. That is no answer. I'm talking plain business.
"And what about book-rights? Who is going to buy novels of three pages? They will have to be printed as leaflets and sold at a penny a dozen."
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Should Soldiers Be Polite?
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"Napoleon laid it down as an axiom that your enemy never ought to be permitted to get away from you—never ought to be allowed to feel, even for a moment, that he had shaken you off. What tactics the Belgian Army might adopt under other conditions I am unable to say, but against me personally that was the plan of campaign it determined upon and carried out with a success that was astonishing, even to myself.
"I found it utterly impossible to escape from the Belgian Army."
Trouble was, the drum. Hilarious, until one comes to this, with a sudden chill.
"It had the effect of making me a peace-at-any-price man."
That was written in in 1905!
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Ought Stories To Be True?
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Serious discourse on literature, although first two paragraphs - and more towards end - are familiar from a previous volume of this series on Idle Thoughts.
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Creatures That One Day Shall Be Men
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Most amazing, prophetic piece about Russia and her then current conditions, and an expected revolution.
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How To Be Happy Though Little
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Hilarious, on jingoism, empires and Holland.
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Should We Say What We Think, Or Think What We Say?
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On hypocrisy.
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Is The American Husband Made Entirely Of Stained Glass
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On American wives in Europe.
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Does The Young Man Know Everything Worth Knowing?
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Idealism, material life, literature, art sale.
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How Many Charms Hath Music, Would You Say?
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Jerome K. Jerome tackles opera and Wagner.
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The white man's burden! Need it be so heavy?
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Prescient expose' on wars and hypocrisy of colonialism.
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Why Didn't He Marry The Girl?
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On Faust and more.
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What Mrs. Wilkins thought about it
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Fiscal questions, dumping, and comedy.
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Shall We Be Ruined By Chinese Cheap Labour?
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Re South African gold mines.
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How To Solve The Servant Problem
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Well written.
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Why We Hate The Foreigner
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German rules.
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August 02, 2020- August 04, 2020.
This etext was produced from the
1905 Hurst and Blackett edition
by
David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
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