English trick of the so morally well-meant and so
intellectually helpless compromise. We live notoriously, as I suppose
every age lives, in an "epoch of transition"; but it may still be
said of the French for instance, I assume, that their social scheme
absolutely provides against awkwardness. That is it would be, by this
scheme, so infinitely awkward, so awkward beyond any patching-up, for
the hovering female young to be conceived as present at "good" talk,
that their presence is, theoretically at least, not permitted till their
youth has been promptly corrected by marriage--in which case they have
ceased to be merely young. The better the talk prevailing in any circle,
accordingly, the more organised, the more complete, the element of
precaution and exclusion. Talk--giving the term a wide application--is
one thing, and a proper inexperience another; and it has never occurred
to a logical people that the interest of the greater, the general,
need be sacrificed to that of the less, the particular. Such sacrifices
strike them as gratuitous and barbarous, as cruel above all to the
social intelligence; also as perfectly preventable by wise arrangement.
Nothing comes home more, on the other hand, to the observer of English
manners than the very moderate degree in which wise arrangement, in
the French sense of a scientific economy, has ever been invoked; a fact
indeed largely explaining the great interest of their incoherence, their
heterogeneity, their wild abundance. The French, all analytically, have
conceived of fifty different proprieties, meeting fifty different cases,
whereas the English mind, less intensely at work, has never conceived
but of one--the grand propriety, for every case, it should in fairness
be said, of just being English. As practice, however, has always to be
a looser thing than theory, so no application of that rigour has been
possible in the London world without a thousand departures from the grim
ideal.

The American theory, if I may "drag it in," would be, I think, that talk
should never become "better" than the female young, either actually or
constructively present, are minded to allow it. THAT system involves as
little compromise as the French; it has been absolutely simple, and the
beauty of its success shines out in every record of our conditions of
intercourse--premising always our "basic" assumption that the female
young read the newspapers. The English theory may be in itself almost
as sim