Mundane Musings

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 191, 2 November 1927, Page 5

Mundane Musings

Male Vanity SYMPATHY OR FLATTERY ? Statistics and the appeal to history prove that men are in fact cleverer than women, more able creatures, better balanced, and mo,re commonsensible. What they would have been had they had the limited environment of the women of past centuries, the lack of education and the enforced short view from which our ancestresses suffered, we do not know. Is it their inevitable consciousness of superiority that makes them so vain? Some of the most brilliant novels written this year have for their theme the vanity of the male. One in particular I think of in which the man has a tremendous mind, an intellectual reach that makes him and other people dizzy, he does really stand on the farthest, loneliest outposts of thought, beyond him is only the unexplored. His wife is not intellectual; she is only a miracle of sincerity and simplicity and love, and she exhausts herself in trying to satisfy the vanity of her husband. He cannot live without constant praise, constant reassurance of his eminence; sometimes she has to be a little insincere to pacify him, and that troubles her. A Familiar Necessity Reading this story, many women must smile or wince as they are reminded, as only genius can remind us, of the necessity that life holds for the patient, skilful, unfailing flattery of men. Alen say that they want our sympathy, and that flatters us till we realise that what they really want is our admiration. The vanity of the intellectual man is a terrible thing: there is only one worse type of vanity, and that is the sort possessed by the man who believes himself to be intellectual and is not; the person who poses as “literary,” and persuades himself that he has an unusual soul to express. He will express that soul to us by the hour if we will let him, and will think we are dreadfully unfeminine if we are not moved almost to tears by the poignancy of his revelations. And Still They Talk! Then there are pleasant business men with no nonsense about them who yet love to talk, and talk and talk, to any woman who will listen to them, during a meal or in a train; they are thoroughly shrewd people, possessed of masculine knowledgeableness and how they like to enlighten us on the world and its ways, or, at least, on such ways as they think fit for discussion before women. We do not mind this brand of vanity so much, for it has less of the poison of egotism in it than that of the person who believes in his own overpoweringly great mentality. . Least annoying of all and most likely of all to be .regarded with real feminine indulgence is the honest pride of the man who rejoices in physical strength and skill. The admiration which he unconsciously demands and which is almost as unconsciously given belongs to the joy of the race when it was young. But vain they are all —with the few happy exceptions which we all know! Our vanity is not so great. Wheii-Wii talk for more than two minutes about ourselves to a charming male companion we discover suddenly that lie is not there.

Deauville emphasised the navy vogue so assiduously that it may be taken as a safe indication of what is to come. Navy, so the experts declare, will rival black in popularity. Navy suits, na-#y coats, navy hats, navy scarves patterned with white spots, white shoes strapped with navy leather—all these were a persistent part of the Deauville panorama.