THE YOUNG IDEA

Southland Times, Issue 20664, 20 April 1929, Page 13

THE YOUNG IDEA

“ONE MERELY LIKES"

(By

“Susan Lee.”)

It must be wonderful to have somebody connected with you who may be depended on to correct your manners. I mean, musn’t it! A mother-in-law, for instance. It must be wonderful to have somebody sufficiently interested in the social growth of your soul to remind yop, even in the presence of a roomful of visitors, that “one does not love things—one merely likes.” Golly (I’m allowed to say this until somebody develops sufficient interest in me to shock it out of me) that’s the way steel is tempered, I bet. You’ve got to have an awful lot of grit to stand it; but if you do, think of your Reward 1n Heaven! “Presented to (pqr) for refraining from murder of mother-in-law over a period of (xyz) years under intense provocation.” Probably like the man and his gumboil, your halo will be bigger, brighter and better thaii anything else in haloes outside pantomime. The trouble may be, of course, that the terrestial publicity arising out of such a possession may be boring to a spirit whose one craving is peace, and the authority to eat your peas with a knife. Well, well—this world is so full of a number of things—but only one mother-in-law to the individual; which doesn't tend .to make the world any the less full, however.

"One doesn’t love, things; one merely likes.” Good old Queen Victoria wheezing above her corsets. "Limbs? No, no! The correct procedure is to create the impression that, one moves on wheels.” The young bride watching the gooseberry bushes to sec if the good Lord had sent her a baby. The young mother, “I was just going to cut the cabbage when I heard a little cry, and there you were, my dear, a tenny, weeny baby. In another minute I would have cut off your head.” The little girl, "I know I came out of a cabbage because I remember the spiders.” Lies? No, never. What pretty fancies sophistication scatters, that is all. It’s awfully nice to think, isn’t it, that Victorianism is still considered the best manners, no matter what the smart people say. I mean, how nice to feel that our grandmothers and their grandmothers were as enlightened in the ways of good breeding as we are, because it just shows you they must be almost, if not altogether, perfect if nobody has ever been able to improve them. Wc ought to be excused, then, for being a little smug, because smugness arises out of self-satisfaction, and of course wc have reason to be satisfied with ourselves. It should even be a source of self-congratulation to us that we are here at all, because just think of the number of people who are dead. I say we re jolly lucky to be still alive, and I think reaily if people like to congratulate themselves on it then they’re showing no more than common courtesy and a proper sense of appreciation to whoever is responsible, beside ourselves, for our being here. But there’s a frightful indication of how things tend to shape themselves if somebody doesn’t undertake to prevent them: Common courtesy. Isn't that, sufficient to cause a whole earth-quake of well-bred shudders, the way those two words seem to rely one on the other these days? Of course the combination Is incongruous and unthinkable. Who ever heard of anything common that, could know or feel anything about courtesy? Courtesy is a word exclusive to the well-born (in other words, rich). It must never be associated with that other word, chivalry, which lost caste from the moment Chaucer, away back in the fourteenth century, dubbed the flower of chivalry as one who never spoke evil of anyone (“he never yet no villaine ne sayde”) and ruined the chances of having his “verray parfit gentill knyght” ever accepted by the Best People. The monkeys who, “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,” must be symbolic of the low grade of evolution of the perpetrators of such a blasphemous code. "One does not love things; one really likes,” and even then only such things as bear the seal of Traditional Approval. The revisor of the Bible who first substituted “love” for “charity” (“faith, hope* and charity, and the greatest of these is charity”) could have been no gentleman to reveal such plebian tendencies. Possibly the aversion to the word “love” springs from the fact that it is a word common to the multitude, and cannot be kept exclusive for the simple fact that money cannot buy it. Really, I mean, it can’t. And just after I’d written that full-stop— I mean, a brilliant thought came to me, and I was always one for wanting to share my good things—of course one should never love: enthusiasm so often breeds perspiration, and that is so odious, isn’t it ?