I HAVE watched you this ten minutes, while your carriage has been standing still, and have seen your smiling face change twice, as though you were about to say; “I am not accustomed to be stopped like this”; but what I have chiefly noticed is that you have not looked at anything except the persons sitting opposite and the backs of your flunkeys on the box. Clearly nothing has distracted you from following your thought: “There is pleasure before me, I am told!” Yours is the three-hundredth carriage in this row that blocks the road for half a mile. In the two hundred and ninety-nine that come before it, and the four hundred that come after, you are sitting too—with your face before you, and your unseeing eyes.
Resented while you gathered being; brought into the world with the most distinguished skill; remembered by your mother when the whim came to her; taught to believe that life consists in caring for your clean, well-nourished body, and your manner that nothing usual can disturb; taught to regard Society as the little ring of men and women that you see, and to feel your only business is to know the next thing that you want and get it given you—You have never had a chance!
You take commands from no other creature; your heart gives you your commands, forms your desires, your wishes, your opinions, and passes them between your lips. From your heart well-up the springs that feed the river of your conduct; but your heart is a stagnant pool that has never seen the sun. Each year when April comes, and the earth smells new, you have an odd aching underneath your corsets. What is it for? You have a husband, or a lover, or both, or neither, whichever suits you best; you have children, or could have them if you wished for them; you are fed at stated intervals with food and wine; you have all you want of country life and country sports; you have the theatre and the opera, books, music, and religion! From the top of the plume, torn from a dying bird, or the flowers, made at an insufficient wage, that decorate your head, to the sole of the shoe that cramps your foot, you are decked out with solemn care; a year of labour has been sewn into your garments and forged into your rings—you are a breathing triumph!
You live in the centre of the centre of the world; if you wish you can have access to everything that has been thought since the world of thought began; if you wish you can see everything that has ever been produced, for you can travel where you like; you are within reach of Nature’s grandest forms and the most perfect works of art. You can hear the last word that is said on everything, if you wish. When you do wish, the latest tastes are servants of your palate, the latest scents attend your nose—You have never had a chance!
For, sitting there in your seven hundred carriages, you are blind—in heart, and soul, and voice, and walk; the blindest creature in the world. Never for one minute of your life have you thought, or done, or spoken for yourself. You have been prevented; and so wonderful is this plot to keep you blind that you have not a notion it exists. To yourself your sight seems good, such is your pleasant thought. Since you cannot even see this hedge around you, how can there be anything the other side? The ache beneath your corsets in the spring is all you are ever to know of what there is beyond. And no one is to blame for this—you least of all.
It was settled, long before the well-fed dullard’s kiss from which you sprang. Forces have worked, in dim, inexorable progress, from the remotest time till they have bred you, little blind creature, to be the masterpiece of their creation. With the wondrous subtlety of Fate’s selection, they have paired and paired all that most narrowly approaches to the mean, all that by nature shirks the risks of living, all that by essence clings to custom, till they have secured a state of things which has assured your coming, in your perfection of nonentity. They have planted you apart in your expensive mould, and still they are at work—these gardeners never idle—pruning and tying night and day to prevent your running wild. The Forces are proud of you—their waxen, scentless flower!
The sun beats down, and still your carriage does not move; and this delay is getting on your nerves. You cannot imagine what is blocking-up your way! Do you ever imagine anything? If all those goodly coverings that contain you could be taken off, what should we find within the last and inmost shell—a little soul that has lost its power of speculation. A soul that was born in you a bird and has become a creeping thing; wings gone, eyes gone, groping, and clawing with its tentacles what is given it.
You stand up, speaking to your coachman! And you are charming, standing there, to us who, like your footman, cannot see the label “Blind.” The cut of your gown is perfect, the dressing of your hair the latest, the trimming of your hat is later still; your trick of speech the very thing; you droop your eyelids to the life; you have not too much powder; it is a lesson in grace to see you hold your parasol. The doll of Nature! So, since you were born; so, until you die! And, with his turned, clean-shaven face, your footman seems to say: “Madam, how you have come to be it is not my province to inquire. You are! I am myself dependent on you!” You are the heroine of the farce, but no one smiles at you, for you are tragic, the most tragic figure in the world. No fault of yours that ears and eyes and heart and voice are atrophied so that you have no longer spirit of your own!
Fashion brought you forth, and she has seen to it that you are the image of your mother, knowing that if she made you by a hair’s-breadth different, you would see what she is like and judge her. You are Fashion, Fashion herself, blind, fear-full Fashion! You do what you do because others do it; think what you think because others think it; feel what you feel because others feel it. You are the Figure without eyes.
And no one can reach you, no one can alter you, poor little bundle of others’ thoughts; for there is nothing left to reach.
In your seven hundred carriages, you pass; and the road is bright with you. Above that road, below it, and on either hand, are the million things and beings that you cannot see; all that is organic in the world, all that is living and creating, all that is striving to be free. You pass, glittering, on your round, the sightless captive of your own triumph; and the eyes of the hollow-chested work-girls on the pavement fix on you a thousand eager looks, for you are strange to them. Many of their hearts are sore with envy; they do not know that you are as dead as snow around a crater; they cannot tell you for the nothing that you are—Fashion! The Figure without eyes!