HEN Cervantes, in order to clear the atmosphere of the seventeenth century, "laughed Spain's chivalry away," and when, in order to perform the same service for the twentieth century, Gelett Burgess identified and isolated that germ of dullness known as the "Bromide," each earned the gratitude of his age. Now a third niche in the Hall of Public Benefactors awaits the man or woman who can give the deathblow to that most contemptible of present-day affectations, "the mucker pose."
This term originated, I believe, with Charles Buchanan, the music critic, who applied it to a certain attitude in discussing art; but there is no phase of modern American social or artistic life in which it is not visible in some form or other.
The mucker pose is that curious state of mind which induces well-bred, intelligent people to disclaim superciliously any refinement, education, or natural good taste which heredity or opportunity may have given them, and to set themselves deliberately to the worship of the coarse or the commonplace. The mucker pose is the antonym of the "highbrow" pose. It is the "I-am-a-plain-blunt-man" sort of boast when used by a person who is really neither plain nor blunt. It is the modern survival of that perverted ambition which induced a Roman emperor to go down into the arena of the circus and, without any danger to himself, be it noted, pose as a gladiator.
I witnessed, the other evening, a most pathetic but singularly perfect example of a person suffering from the mucker pose. The poseur was a stout, middle-aged, unmarried woman who was a guest at a country house. As one could easily see, through her smoke-screen of affectations, she was, at heart, a rather nice and well-meaning person, a gentlewoman by birth and a scholar by instinct. She was a teacher of some sort of minor art in one of the semi-endowed institutes of New York City. She was really an authority on a comparatively rare subject, and, from what our hostess was able to tell us, her private life had been the combination of bitter disappointments and precious, modest triumphs which is common to women in such careers. When, in short, she could forget her pose, she was just the kind of amiable old New England lady that one would be glad to have for an aunt, but once let her loose in a mixed gathering, especially one which was fairly young and liberal in its habits, and she became simply a pathetic old cow capering on cider apples.
It was obvious that her main idea of social verve was to be daring, although she succeeded only in being revolting. It was not so much that she swore occasionally, with those unskillful, nerve-grating, near-oaths which are far more upsetting than outright profanity from accustomed lips. It was not that she smoked a cigarette held ponderously between her fat thumb and first finger. In her, the mucker pose displayed itself most abominably in the cheap, common ideas, totally false to her background and her profession, which she felt obliged to air boisterously in the frantic effort to be "popular."
At all the old classic standards, which, I am sure, had been the backbone of the many generations of Puritan clergymen who must have preceded her, she hooted contemptuously. She prattled easily in the catch phrases of the day. At all social niceties which make life agreeable for those who can afford them, such as evening dress in the country and the offices of a butler, she railed as pure "fla-fla." Gentlewomen of the sort which must have been very dear to her mother and grandmother she dismissed in a group as "stodgy." She even upheld jazz music, although, as she had a rather fine musical education herself, she must have had to struggle hard to enjoy it.
Where this old party had acquired this hideous and most unbecoming viewpoint it was not hard to discover. It seems that, as a professional woman, she had the usual "little apartment" in Greenwich Village. Her hostess, who had known her in a happier epoch, tried to excuse her by explaining that, in New York, she was intimate with "a circle of artists, musicians, and writers."
One knew instinctively just what kind of "artists, musicians, and writers" would belong to such a "circle," but many artists, musicians, and writers who ought to know better have been woefully susceptible, of late years, to the mucker pose, either assuming it as part of their own professional armor or catering to it as one of the most profitable weaknesses of their public.