our literature grows sinister and bitter, and our daughters yearn after this and that, write odd books, and ride about on bicycles in remarkable clothes.  They have shut down the safety valve, they suffer from the present lamentable increase of gentleness.  They must find some outlet, or perish.  If they could only put their arms akimbo and tell each other a piece of their minds for a little, in the ancient way, there can be not the slightest doubt that much of this fin-de-siecle unwholesomeness would disappear.

Possibly this fashion of gentleness will pass.  Yet it has had increasing sway now for some years.  An unhealthy generation has arisen—­among the more educated class at least—­that quarrels little, regards the function as a vice or a nuisance, as the East-ender does a taste for fine art or literature.  We seem indeed to be getting altogether out of the way of it.  Rare quarrels, no doubt, occur to everyone, but rare quarrelling is no quarrelling at all.  Like beer, smoking, sea-bathing, cycling, and the like delights, you cannot judge of quarrelling by the early essay.  But to show how good it is—­did you ever know a quarrelsome person give up the use?  Alcohol you may wean a man from, and Barrie says he gave up the Arcadia Mixture, and De Quincey conquered opium.  But once you are set as a quarreller you quarrel and quarrel till you die.

How to quarrel well and often has ever been something of an art, and it becomes more of an art with the general decline of spirit.  For it takes two to make a quarrel.  Time was when you turned to the handiest human being, and with small care or labour had the comfortable warmth you needed in a minute or so.  There was theology, even in the fifties it was ample cause with two out of three you met.  Now people will express a lamentable indifference.  Then politics again, but a little while ago fat for the fire of any male gathering, is now a topic of mere tepidity.  So you are forced to be more subtle, more patient in your quarrelling.  You play like a little boy playing cricket with his sisters, with those who do not understand.  A fellow-votary is a rare treat.  As a rule you have to lure and humour your antagonist like a child.  The wooing is as intricate and delicate as any wooing can well be.  To quarrel now, indeed, requires an infinity of patience.  The good old days of thumb-biting—­“Do you bite your thumbs at us, sir?” and so to clash and stab—­are gone for ever.

There are certain principles in quarrelling, however, that the true quarreller ever bears in mind, and which, duly observed, do much to facilitate encounters.  In the first place, cultivate Distrust.  Have always before you that this is a wicked world, full of insidious people, and you never know what villainous encroachments upon you may be hidden under fair-seeming appearances.  That is the flavour of it.  At the first suspicion, “stick up for your rights,” as the vulgar say.  And see that you do it suddenly.