Mrs Albert Grundy—Observations in Philistia

Harold Frederic

Harold Frederic

Mrs Albert Grundy—Observations in Philistia

Presenting in Outline the Comfortable and Well-Regulated Paradox over which She Presides, and showing its Mental Elevation

I suppose about the name there is no doubt. For sixty years we have followed that gifted gadabout and gossip, Heine, and called it Philistia. And yet, when one thinks of it, there may have been a mistake after all. Artemus Ward used to say that he had been able, with effort, to comprehend how it was possible to measure the distance between the stars, and even the dimensions and candle-power, so to speak, of those heavenly bodies; what beat him was how astronomers had ever found out their names. So I find myself wondering whether Philistia really is the right name for the land where She must be obeyed.

If so, it is only a little more the region of mysterious paradox and tricksy metamorphosis. We think of it always and from all time as given over to Her rule. We feel in our bones that there was a troglodyte Mrs Grundy; we imagine to ourselves a British matron contemporary with the cave bear and the woolly elephant But her very antiquity only makes it more puzzling.

There is an old gentleman who always tries to prove to me that the French are really Germans, that the Germans are all Slavs, and that the Russians are strictly Tartars: that is to say, that in keeping-count of the early races as they swarmed Westward we somehow skipped one, and have been wrong ever since. There must be some such explanation of how the domain which She sways came to be called Philistia.

I say this, because the old Philistia was tremendously masculine. It was the Jews who struck the feminine note. They used to swagger no end when they won a victory, and utilise it to the utmost limit of merciless savagery; but when it came their turn to be thrashed they filled the very heavens with complaining clamour. We got no hint that the Philistines ever failed to take their medicine like men.

Consider those splendid later Philistines, the Norsemen. In all their martial literature there is no suggestion of a whine. They loved fighting for its own sake; next to braining their foes, they admired being themselves hewn into sections. They never blamed their gods when they had the worst of it. They never insisted that they were always right and their enemies invariably wrong. They cared nothing about all that. They demanded only fun. It was their victims, the Frankish and Irish monks, who shed women’s tears and besought Providence to play favourites.

And here is the paradox. The children of these Berserker loins are become the minions of Mrs Grundy. By some magic she has enshrined Respectability in their temples. In one division of her empire she makes Mr Helmer drink tea; in another she sets everybody reading the Buchholz Family; in her chosen island home her husband on the sunniest Sundays carries an umbrella instead of a walking-stick. Fancy the wild delirium of delight with which the old Philistines would have raided her homestead, chopping down her Robert Elsmeres, impaling her Horsleys, and making the skies lurid with the flames of her semi-detached villa! Yet we call her place Philistia!

I know the villa very well. It is quite near to the South Kensington Museum. The title “Fernbank” is painted on the gate-posts. How well-ordered and comfortable does life beyond those posts remain! Here are no headaches in the morning. Here white-capped domestics move with neat alertness along the avenues of gentle routine, looking neither to the policeman on the right nor fiery-jacketed Thomas Atkins on the left. Here my friend Mr Albert Grundy invariably comes home by the Underground to dinner. Here his three daughters – girls of a type with a diminishing upper lip, with sharper chins and greater length of limb than of old – lead deeply washed existences, playing at tennis, smiling in flushed silence at visitors, feeding contentedly upon Mudie’s stores, the while their mamma spreads the matrimonial net abo