Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair by Bohemians Bootleggers Flappers & Swells

Author:Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers & Swells
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT, EXACTLY, IS MODERN?

ALDOUS HUXLEY

FROM MAY 1925

At a café in Siena I once got into conversation with an Italian medical student. Like most of his compatriots, he was very open and confiding. We had not known one another half an hour before he told me the whole story of his life. Among other things he informed me that he had spent a year as a student at the University of Rome, but that he had been compelled to remove to Siena because it was impossible for him to learn anything at Rome; there were too many distractions in the capital, too many feminine distractions in particular. He knew that he would never get a degree if he stayed at Rome. “In a little town like Siena,” I said, “I suppose there are no distractions of that sort?” “Not so many,” he admitted, “as at Rome. All the same,” he added, and smiled a smile of male fatuity, “you’d be surprised by the young women of Siena. They’re really very modern.” And he went on to tell me of his adventures with the local shop girls.

I laughed, not at his stories, which were exceedingly tedious and commonplace, but at his peculiar use of the word, “modern”. It was the first time I had heard it employed in such a context. Since then I have heard it similarly used, more than once. I remember, in London, hearing one of those scrubby camp-followers of the arts who make their “artistic temperament” the excuse for leading an idle, sordid and perfectly useless life, loudly and proudly boasting that he was absolutely modern: anyone might have his wife, so far as he was concerned. And he gave it to be understood that the lady in question thought just as little of promiscuous infidelity—was, in a word, just as modern—as he.

Now, as a grammarian and a literary pedant, I strongly object to the improper use of words. Every word possesses some single, definite meaning. It should always be used in its accepted sense and not forced to signify something it was never meant to signify. Thus, when one wants to say of a person that he or she is lascivious and insensitive to the point of indulging promiscuously in what is technically known as “love”, one should state the fact in so many words and not say that he or she is “modern”. For such a person is not modern, but on the contrary, antique and atavistic. To behave like the Romans under Caracalla, the Asiatic Greeks, the Babylonians, is not a bit modern. In point of historical fact it is monogamous love and chastity that are the modern inventions. My Italian friend and the young camp-follower of the arts were terribly old-fashioned, if only they had known it. They were eighteenth-century in their outlook, they were Roman-Empire, they were Babylonian. Really modern people love like the Brownings.

My Italian friend and the camp-follower of the arts had, it is true, a certain justification for their employment

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