THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIII, Issue XV, 13 October 1894, Page 353

THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING.

Your cultivated man is apt to pity the respectable poor on the score of their lack of small excitements, and even in the excess of his generous sympathy to go a Toynbee-Hailing in their cause. And Mr Walter Besant once wrote a book about Hoxton, chiefly saying how monotonous life was there. That is your modern fallacy respecting the lower middle class. One might multiply instances. The tenor of pity is always the same. *No music,’ says the cultivated man ; * no pictures, no books to read nor leisure to read in. How can they pass their lives !’ The answer is simple enough, as Emily Bronte knew. They quarrel. And an excellent way of passing the time it is, so excellent indeed that the pity were better inverted. But we all lack the knowledge of our chiefest needs. In the first place and mainly, IT IS HYGIENIC TO QUARREL, it disengages floods of nervous energy, the pulse quickens, the breathing is accelerated, the digestion improved. Then it sets one’s stagnant brain astir and quickens the imagination, it clears the mind of vapour as thunder clears the air. And finally it is a natural function of the body. In his natural state, man is always quarrelling—by instinct. Not to quarrel is indeed one of the vices of our civilisation, one of the reasons why we are neurotic and annemic and all these things. And at last our enfeebled palates have even lost the capacity for enjoying a ■ jolly good row. There can be no more melancholy sight in the world than that of YOUR YOUNG MAN OR YOUNG WOMAN SUFFERING FROM SUPPRESSED PUGNACITY. Up to the end of the school years it was well with them, they had ample scope for this wholesome commerce, the neat give and take of offence. In the family circle, too, there are still plentiful chances of acquiring the taste. Then, suddenly, they must be gentle and considerate, and all the rest of it. A wholesome shindy, so soon as toga and long skirts arrive, is looked upon as positively wrong ; even the dear old institution of the * ent ’ is falling into disrepute. The quarrelling is all forced back into our system, as it were ; it poisons the blood. This is why our literature grows sinister and bitter, and our daughters yearn after this and that, write Pseudonyms, and ride bicycles about in remarkable clothes. They have shut down the safety valve, they suffer from the present lamentable increase of gentleness. They must find some outlet or perish. If they could only put their arms akimbo and tell each other a piece of their minds for a little in the ancient way, there can be not the slightest doubt that much of this fin de siecle unwholesomeness would disappear. Possibly this fashion of gentleness will pass. Yet it has had increasing sway now for some years.

AN UNHEALTHY GENERATION HAS ARISEN —among the more educated class, at least—that quarrels but little, and regards the function as a vice or a nuisance, as the Eastender does a taste for fine art or literature. We seem indeed to be getting altogether out of the way of it. Rare quarrels no doubt occur to everyone, but rare quarrelling is no quarrelling at all. It is an acquired taste. Like beer, smoking, sea-bathing, cycling, you cannot judge of quarrelling by the first essay. But to show how good it is —did you ever know a quarrelsome person give up the use ’ Alcohol you may wean a man from. Mr Banie says he gave up the Arcadia Mixture; and De Quincey conquered opium. But once you are set as a quareller you quarrel and quarrel till you die. HOW TO QUARREL WELL AND OFTEN HAS EVER BEEN SOMETHING OF AN ART, and it becomes more of an art with the general decline of spirit. For it takes two to make a quarrel. Time was when you turned to the handiest human being, and with small care or labour had the comfortable warmth you needed in a minute or so. There was theology, even in the fifties it was ample cause with two out of three you met; now people will express a lamentable indifference. Then politics again, but a little while ago fat for the fire of any male gathering, is now a topic of mere tepidity. So you are forced to be more subtle, more patient in your quarrelling. Yon play, like a little boy playing cricket with his sisters, with those who do not understand. A fellow votary is a rare treat. As a rule you have to lure and humour your autagonist like a child. The wooing is as intricate and delicate as any wooing can well be. To quarrel now, indeed, requires an infinity of patience. The good old days of thumb-biting—• Do you bite your thumbs at us, sir ?’ and so to clash and stab—are gone for ever. THERE ARE CERTAIN PRINCIPLES IN QUARRELLING, however, that the true quarreller ever bears in mind, and which duly observed, do much to facilitate encounters. In the first place cultivate distrust. Have always before you that this is a wicked world, full of insidious people, and you never know what villainous encroachments upon you may be hidden under fair-seeming appearances, That is the flavour of it. At the first suspicion ‘ stick out for your rights,’ as the vulgar say. And see that you do it suddenly. Smite promptly, and the surprise and sting of your injustice should provoke an excellent reply. And where there is least ground for suspicion, there, remember, is the most. The good hand of fellowship extended towards you is one of the best openings you have. • Not such a fool,’ is the kind of attitnde to assume, and • You don’t nut upon me so easy.’ Your adversary resents this a little, and, rankling, tries to explain, You find a personal inference in the expostulation. The rest is easy.

Next to a wariness respecting your interests is A KEEN REGARD FOR YOUR HONOUR. Have concealed in the privacy of your mind a code of what is due to you. Expand or modify it as occasion offers. Be as it were a collector of what are called * slights,’ and never let one pass you. Watch your friend in doorways, passages ; when be eats by you, when he drinks with you, when he addresses yon, when he writes you letters. It will be hard if you cannot catch him smuggling some deadly insult into your presence. Tax him with it. He did not think, forsooth ! Tell him no gentleman would do such a thing, tbinkingly or not; that you think it dreadfully rude; that you certainly will not stand it again. Say you will show him. He will presently argue or contradict. So to your climax. THEN, AGAIN, THERE IS THE PERSONAL REFERENCE. ‘Meaning me, sir!’ Your victim with a blithe heart babbles of this or that. You let him meander here and there, watching him as if you were in ambush. Presently he comes into your springe. *Of course,’ you say ; • 1 saw what you were driving at just this minute, when you mentioned mustard in salad dressing, but if I am peppery I am not mean. And if I have a thing to say I say it straight out.’ A good gambit this, and well into him from the start. The particular beauty of this is that you get him apologetic at first, and can score heavily before he rises to the defensive. THEN FINALLY THERE IS YOUR ABSTRACT CAUSE, once very fruitful indeed, but now sadly gone in decay, except perhaps in specialist society. As an example, let there he one who is gibing genially at some topic or other, at Japanese king crabs, or the inductive process, or any other topic which cannot possibly affect you one atom. Then is the time to drop all these merely selfish interests, and to champion the cause of truth. Fall upon him in a fine glow of indignation, and bring your contradiction across his face —whack !—so that all the table may hear. These are the four chief ways of quarrelling, the four gates to this delightful city.

A private telephone has, we are informed, been established by the Abbe L. Michel, who uses the ground for wires. His idea was that the surface soil and the deep soil are separated by a layer of greater resistance, which acts as an insulator, and might, therefore, be taken as the going and returning wires of the circuit. The telephones were connected to the surface, we understand, by a metal plate and the subsoil by a deep well at each station, and with a battery of five accumulators he found he could speak very well, with buildings and a public street between the stations, over a distance of 120 yards or more.