“SNOOPOPATHIC" YOUTHS A Present-Day Problem

Manawatu Times, Volume LIV, Issue 6815, 21 January 1929, Page 4

“SNOOPOPATHIC" YOUTHS A Present-Day Problem

■ NE can sympathise with Mr. Basil Dean (writes Mr. Trevor Allen in the "Daily Chronicle”). He wanted a manly young actor for the part of Beau Geste. Instead of the handsome, manly type, he encountered, he says, "nothing but effeminate young men, who have flounced into ,my office and exclaimed, in high-pitched, namby-pamby tones, ‘I want to play Beau Geste.’ ”

That type to-day is by no means confined to the theatre world, though it seems to flourish there as orchids do in a hot-house atmosphere. One meets it in most plages—in sub-tropi-cal Mayfair, in artistic Chelsea and Hampstead and St. John’s Wood, in literary coteries,. mixed clubs, dance halls, in Knightsbridge and the Whitechapel Road, round the coffee bars and other elect haunts of the West End. Sometames ith lisps lake this, wears “bags” like the skirts of a houri, and addresses its kind “My deah.”

Men of the sort Mr. Dean is looking for have turned to me with astonishment, when we have accidentally run into a batch of It, and remarked: “Good heavens, where has It sprung from? What is It? How does It figure in the census returns?” Women have said to me: “It’s uncanny. They do not regard you as men would. They look at you and what you are wearing, just as other women do. Women despise them.” It is, I suppose, a post-war phenomenon —though one has grown rather tired of speaking about ! post-war phenomena, just as one has about the Modern Woman. It certainly did not belong to the generation which carried on the war; it is probably a reaction from it.

Put one generation of young men into trenches, and the odds are that you will have to put the next —or a certain proportion of it —into petticoats. That’s a way evolution has. The fashionable salons of Europe, in the period following the Napoleonic wars, were a proof of it, no less than the more languid haupts of society today. After the Spartan- Greeks, we had the priceless young Romans of the sisterhood of Petronius. It Is not the first time the pendulum has swung from blood to lipstick. ...

I suppose one should not be angry; one may even be sympathetic and tolerant. These charming, effeminate young men whom Mr. Dean has discovered, along with the rest of us, wore mothers’ boys when the War was on. The pater, probably, and elder brother. Bill, and cousin Harry and Uncle Harry were away doing the job. They might never return; maybe, they never did.

What more natural than that the young master, the young white hope of the family name' and tradition, should be somewhat cherished and potted? What more inevitable than that mater and the.sisters should be prone to dote and coddle? Feminine Influence Outside the home there was the rarefied, rigorous atmosphere of war, discipline, sacrifice —but the iad was too young to understand that. Inside there was an influence almost exclusively feminine —no boy is ever too young to respond to, and be enervated by, that. Then the after-the-Armistice years. What a period for a susceptible and already spoilt young man to surrender his adolescence to! A society impoverished of its men, shorn of most of its old restraints; a transition phase of licence, disillusionment, heartbreak, frivolity. A time of the virtual dominance of feminine ideas and ideals in practically all branches of life, with the men who were men otherwise occupied scraping back a livelihood in a world which had been left topsy-turvy by an unprecedented unheaval. Mr. Basil Dean need not be surprised. His young men are the product of an unusual era. In a society in which women seem just too, too clamorous about their reservations and rights, he must expect the young men to forget something of their heritage. According to nature’s wondrous law of balance, too many masculine women should imply too many effeminate men. For every extra woman bawling her propaganda from the Hyde Park forum there will probably be an additional young man lisping sweet nothings at a West End coffee bar. And so the world jogs on

Still, one can understand that, in the interim, this exceptional emergence o'f the modern version of the greeneryyallery, Grosvenor Gallery, ultrapoetical, super-aesthetical, out-of-the way young man is a trifle disturbing to the fellow who slogged through the war, the fellow who comes from the outposts of Empire, the fellow who considers that a man, to be a man, should retain a certain amount of selfrespect, tenacity and integrity even in a feminist age. One can understand his sympathy with the Stephen Leacock humorist who exclaimed: — “The up-to-date clean-shaven snoopopathic man. . . . How one would enjoy seeing a man—a real one with Nevada whiskers and long boots — land him one solid kick from behind!” The snoopopathic young man, Mr. Basil Dean, will pass, have no fear—or at least retire into his former pbscurity. If he does not die of inanition he will probably be killed by ridicule. And the men who will soon shoo his type back to where it came from are the lusty, gritty youngsters rushing pell-mell about our school playgrounds to-day.