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The Way We Go Ins and Outs of Life

Told By Leo Fanning

It is a merry party—the feast of reason, the flow of soul, and so on. Joy abounds, with ripples, peals, and rumbles of laughter, according to the sex, age, and temperament of the happy folk. Suddenly the air is chill and heavy; bright eyes lose their sparkle; buoyancy subsides in limpness. Mr. Bromide has intruded—Mr. Bromide of the putty face, the leaden brow, the lack-lustre eye, and thick, sticky speech. He is a sapper—the deadliest of the bore tribe—and he wilts the assembly as quickly as the summer sun frazzles a fallen rose.

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A few years ago, before women's hair, jazz, wireless, the “sex appeal,” strong drink, and other trifles caught so much space in the papers, some of the bigger things had a run in print, and among them was the subject of positives and negatives (inspirers or sappers or sulphides and bromides) in human types. The discussion went far enough to provoke an American to write a book entitled: “Are You a Bromide?” (which this commentator has not read). This was a polite way of asking: Are you a leaning tower of poison? Are you two ton of stodge? Are you the inhuman embodiment of the deadly nightshade? Are you an incentive to suicide (or murder) in the other fellow? The sulphide is, of course the opposite of the bromide.

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All humanity is divided into three parts—the positives, the negatives, and the neutrals. The positives are comparatively few, the negatives are numerous, and the neutrals are the vast majority. The neutral may become occasionally positive or negative, the positive may lapse now and then into negativeness, but the born negative can never be a positive; once a negative always a negative. The bromide can no more be a sulphide than a cow can be a professor of psychology—which is well for the cow, and well for the world.

What is a sulphide or positive? This is like asking: What is electricity? What is the sap of plants? What is the irresistible force that overcomes an immovable object? The whole of the world's drive in arts and crafts, in peace and war, in religion, in all forms of virtue and vice, has come, of course, from the positives. The greatest patriots and the basest traitors have been positives, whose numbers include some truly terrible persons.

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There are mild, medium, and full-strength sulphides. The world needs the full-strength types for big business, but they can be very disturbing to people near them. For ordinary workaday life the mild or medium positive is enough. He does not assert himself too much: he does not drive too hard; he does not over-whelm you with his restless energy.

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The ideal sulphide, socially is one between the mild and the medium—never tepid, never tame, but never overdoing the radiant effect. This is the sulphide of charm—natural charm, which is as different from the artificial simulation as a camp-fire is from a brilliant painting of a glowing hearth. There is no hope of getting this charm from a brush or a bottle, a stocking, or a garter.

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The world's tremendous sulphides have been mostly men, but the majority of the mild and medium grades are women, whose charm continues to inspire humanity. This is the charm which is the saving grace of the world—but, alas, it is not always exercised for good. Yet that is the way with all things. No manufacturer ever made revolvers or razors for the express purpose of suicide or murder.

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Men sometimes wonder why one of them—a fellow regarded as ugly, as the Apollo standard goes—seems to be a favourite among women. There is no mystery in this to the women. The man is a sulphide; he has charm. Woman is as naturally attracted to the sulphide man as man is to the sulphide woman. It is a case of the needle and the magnet, the scrap of paper and the electrified amber, the bee and the flower, or other similes which the psychologists or psychometrists can suggest.

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The old proverb, “Birds of a feather flock together,” applies to sulphides, but not to bromides. No bromide will deliberately seek the company of another bromide, but clings as instinctively to a sulphide as woolly aphis does to the apple tree. When you see a bromide woman marrying a bromide you know that he is not her first love; far from it. She has tried for many sulphides, but they have escaped.

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Some sulphides are vexingly inconsistent. The basic sulphide nature is always in them, as gold is in a reef, but it is not always visible. Such sulphides are radiant by fits and starts. They are like fires of shavings—beautiful flares for a few moments, and then ashes. Some of the better sulphides are like log fires, and others like the steady glow of lignite.

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Some persons who are unlovingly termed “very positive” are merely noisy bromides, ill-tempered negatives. Others, who are not querulous, have a fussy activity which they imagine is helpful energy. Their ill-ordered, aimless hustle or bustle can be as exasperating as the uproar of that most diabolical contraption, the motor-cycle. Yet there can be a temporarily successful mimicry of the sulphide by the bromide—but no bromide can sulphide all the people all the time, as many a bromide politician has learned, to his sorrow.

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Naturally no bromide ever believes he is a bromide, although his instinct is to seek the sulphide. Perhaps he believes it is a case of like to like. The bore believes that he is an intensely interesting person, and he feels that he has a call to make life interesting for others. However, the human bromide or negative has his uses in the world just as the drug bromide has in medicine. The human bromide is the brake on the wheel, the water in the whisky, the bread or sawdust in the sausage, the chicory in the coffee—a necessary or unnecessary diluent or adulterant in many things—but who can be blamed for trying to dodge him?

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When a sulphide masquerades as a bromide, look out. It is admitted everywhere that the world's best business brains are in London. Does the English money magnate look like a sulphide? Report saith that he can look like a petrified tuatara. He pretends to be a bromide golliwog, inert, formally polite, apparently dull and stupid—and thus he outwits the Hebrew, the Scot, yea, even the Irish. The sulphide's most subtle feat is this cool assumption of bromidism.