Courting Nuisance |
In one of its first manifestations-in courtly love-courtship was a refinement of an adulterous passion. Within the span covered by these pages it changes from the siege of another man's wife to the siege of a maiden, with a view to marriage. The dictionary considers that the word 'court' is now 'somewhat homely; also poetical'. But the alternative names applied to this activity in recent times have been weak and evasive ones, when they have not been openly derisory: Walking Out, Keeping Company, Going Steady, Spooning, Dating, Pitching Woo. Still worse, as Mr Walter de la Mare has pointed out, are our synonyms for 'lover': 'we have only such tepid or dead-alive terms as follower, fellow, young man, admirer, suitor, beau, flame, swain, inamorato and lady-love. Names like these have a feebly facetious, deprecating ring about them. They illustrate the mocking attitude to courting held by half the population. They are part of the traditional humor enveloping the subject-odious young brothers being bribed to stay out of the parlor, shirt-sleeved fathers forced to sit grumbling, in the kitchen night after night until their daughters are married off. Those who do not look on courting as a joke tend to look on it as a public nuisance. Nothing could be less true than "all the world loves a lover'. Down the generations, mistresses have insisted that their servants should have 'no followers'. Landladies who give board to single girls stipulate ‘no visitors'. Farmers fume at the damage to crops and haystacks caused by courting couples. Park-keepers eject lovers from bushes, vicars chase them out of churchyards, orderly officers turn them out of sentry-boxes. In dark roads, policemen rap at the windows of parked motor cars. Bishops protest at the abandoned behavior of couples on seaside sands. Moviegoers fret at the nuisance of sitting behind two heads propped together. Every year the railways spend large sums in replacing electric-light bulbs thrown from carriage windows by those who have no desire for illumination. Day by day, it might seem, life becomes more difficult for courting couples-and equally for those who have to suffer them. A shopkeeper, apprehensive of burglars, installs a microphone over the doorway of his premises, but is forced to remove it after only a few nights because it relays over-intimate conversations. An owner of a television set goes out to argue with a young man who is kissing his girl goodnight in a motor vehicle with the engine running, and has his jaw broken for his pains. Yet rarely in history have courting couples found their path smoothed for them. Modern lovers must draw what consolation they can from the fact that the woods are no longer full of spring-guns and mantraps, and that holding hands is no longer construed as 'sinful dalliance'. Mr H. G. Wells was one who deplored the attitude of the community towards its courting couples. 'After all,' he said in Tono-Bungay, 'the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the State are subsidiary to it. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide it but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whispering and cant-smeared examples.' Our flushed and blundering youth has learned a thing or two since that was written (1908), but if it is surrounded by less cant it is still enveloped in a substantial cloud of twaddle. Not that youth pays over-much attention to the advice-sensible or otherwise-offered it. Week after week, in those feminine magazines which tell how a pert bust can bring romance, hopeful young women write seeking editorial permission to sleep with their fiancés. They know perfectly well what the answer will be, but the strain of staying celibate for perhaps ten years after puberty (which modern civilization demands) is a heavy one, and they keep on asking. The result of it all is seen in the Registrar-General's statistics, which disclose that approximately one bride in six is pregnant on her wedding day (or nearly one in four under the age of twenty-one). It is a reasonable, and not too ungallant, inference that some of the others also 'anticipated marriage', but evaded statistical consequences. No doubt a proportion of the pregnant brides come from those rural districts where it is regarded as mere prudence for a man to ascertain before marriage whether his union will be fruitful. Many of an older generation are convinced that the art of courting has been extinct these last fifty years. There is nothing, they say, except sex talk and casual furtive intimacies. No one can turn a compliment any more; the language which once offered sweethearts 'thee and thou' (as the French still have their ‘tu' and the Germans their ‘du') has become too corrupted for love. This is an unnecessarily gloomy view. Certainly romantic love has been much devalued, consisting as it does of a vague muddle of tenderness, conceit, gross superstition and lovely dreams. Possibly the telephone, the motor-car and the cinema have made love-making a shade too easy. But if modern lovers do not love with the old intensity, if their feelings are less soft and sensible than are the tender horns of cockled snails, is that entirely a cause for grief? Men do not flee to the ends of the earth when rejected; they try again. According to statistics, ‘unrequited love is no longer so decisive a factor in suicide as formerly,' says Otto Neurath, in Modern Man in the Making; a modest gain, and one worth putting on record. Though the lover sings ‘I was made for you, You were made for me', he knows by now that the world holds considerably more than one woman. There is good sport to be had whittling down the possibles, and he is certainly not willing to cede the task of match-making to the Lord Chancellor (as Dr Johnson suggested), or to the public hangman (as H. L. Mencken preferred). Only in his most disillusioned moments will he suspect that the marriages of some of his friends are possibly less satisfactory than they would have been if they had been drawn up by a reasonably enlightened state functionary. Even in totalitarian lands the choosing of a mate is left to private enterprise. It is a pity that more details are not available of the way in which boy meets girl in the shadow of the Kremlin. Newspaper reports give tantalizing glimpses. According to the News Chronicle of October 20th, 1952, Moscow Radio took listeners to a music hall to hear the Party line on courtship. The boy was a collective farmer, and the girl a tractor driver working on the same night shift. Sighed the girl: 'How wonderful it is to work on such a beautiful night under the full moon and do one's utmost to save petrol!' Exclaimed the boy: ‘The night inspires me to over-fulfil my quota by a higher and still higher percentage.' Later he admitted: ‘I fell in love with your working achievement from the very first moment'. Burlesque? There was no suggestion of this in the report. About the same time many newspapers carried a report about rules of courtship enforced by Burmese Communists (as revealed to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions). A young Communist in Burma, it appeared, must not use bourgeois sentimental addresses like 'I love you' or ‘You are beautiful'. The correct approach was to say: ‘I am deeply impressed by your qualities as a faithful and energetic member of the Party, and I wish to wage the Party struggle together with you.' The suitor must not start his courtship without giving prior notice to the Executive Committee. While matrimonial talks were in progress between two persons, no other suitor was allowed to intervene. Any infringements of these regulations, said the report, was punishable by death. Until further information is available, the man in the street will think it probable that, in the game of love, there is as much discrepancy between Party precept and private practice in the Communist world as there is between priestly precept and private practice in the West. In a study like this there are bound to be generalizations. At any period in history courting is conducted according to different standards in different sections of the community. Even in the halls of the Borgias, no doubt, there were those who could say ‘I come unto my courtship as my prayer'. All that can be attempted here is to try to distinguish broad trends. No attempt has been made in these pages to describe quaint old folk customs in quaint old villages. A work with this title cannot omit all mention of love-letters, but it is not concerned with those literary love affairs in which the correspondents wrote with one eye on posterity. The literary man, as Thurber and White have pointed out, 'would rather leap into print with his lady than leap into bed with her'. A gruesome chapter could be written showing how love brings genius down to a common level. It would tell how Swift protested to Stella ‘I a'nt drunk' and wished her ‘Dood mollow'; how Carlyle called Jane ‘niy little Screamikin'; how Dickens called Kate Hogarth 'dearest Pig' and 'dearest Titmouse', and urged her not to be ‘coss'; and how George Bernard Shaw dispatched to Mrs Pat Campbell (his loveliest, doveliest) letters which read 'Stella, Stella, Stella, Stella' endlessly repeated. The loves of literary men may figure occasionally in these pages, but not their letters. Sir Walter Raleigh was near the truth when he said: They that are rich in words, in words discover |