Sometimes, on the beach at Newport, I look at the gayly dressed ladies in
their phaetons, and then at the foam which trembles on the breaking wave,
or lies palpitating in creamy masses on the beach. It is as pretty as they,
as light, as fresh, as delicate, as changing; and no doubt the graceful
foam, if it thinks at all, fancies that it is the chief consummate product
of the ocean, and that the main end of the vast currents of the mighty deep
is to yield a few glittering bubbles like those. At least, this seems to me
what many of the fair ladies think, as to themselves.
Here is a nation in which the most momentous social and political
experiment ever tried by man is being worked out, day by day. There is
something ocean-like in the way in which the great currents of life, race,
religion, temperament are here chafing with each other, safe from the
storms through which all monarchical countries may yet have to pass. As
these great currents heave, there are tossed up in every watering-place and
every city in America, as on an ocean beach, certain pretty bubbles of
foam; and each spot, we may suppose, counts its own bubbles brighter than
those of its neighbors, and christens them "society."
It is an unceasing wonder to a thoughtful person, at any such resort, to
see the unconscious way in which fashionable society accepts the foam, and
ignores the currents. You hear people talk of "a position in society," "the
influential circles in society," as if the position they mean were not
liable to be shifted in a day; as if the essential influences in America
were not mainly to be sought outside the world of fashion. In other
countries it is very different. The circle of social caste, whose centre
you touch in London, radiates to the farthest shores of the British empire;
the upper class controls, not merely fashion, but government; it rules in
country as well as city; genius and wealth are but its tributaries.
Wherever it is not so, it is because England is so far Americanized. But in
America the social prestige of the cities is nothing in the country; it is
a matter of the pavement, of a three-mile radius.
Go to the farthest borders of England: there are still the "county
families," and you meet servants in livery. On the other hand, in a little
village in northern New Hampshire, my friend was visited in the evening by
the landlady, who said that several of their "most fashionable ladies" had
happened in, and she would like to show them her guest's bonnet. Then the
different cities ignore each other: the rulers of select circles in New
York may find themselves nobodies in Washington, while a Washington social
passport counts for as little in New York. Boston and Philadelphia affect
to ignore both; and St. Louis and San Francisco have their own standards.
The utmost social prestige in America is local, provincial, a matter of the
square inch: it is as if the foam of each particular beach along the
seacoast were to call itself "society."
There is something pathetic, therefore, in the unwearied pains taken by
ambitious women to establish a place in some little, local, transitory
domain, to "bring out" their daughters for exhibition on a given evening,
to form a circle for them, to marry them well. A dozen years hence the
millionaires whose notice they seek may be paupers, or these ladies may be
dwelling in some other city, where the visiting cards will bear wholly
different names. How idle to attempt to transport into American life the
social traditions and delusions which require monarchy and primogeniture,
and a standing army, to keep them up--and which cannot always hold their
own in England, even with the aid of these!
Every woman, like every man, has a natural desire for influence; and if
this instinct yearns, as it often should yearn, to take in more than her
own family, she must seek it somewhere outside. I know women who bring to
bear on the building-up of a frivolous social circle--frivolous, because it
is not really brilliant, but only showy; not really gay, but only bored--
talent and energy enough to influence the mind and thought of the nation,
if only employed in some effective way. Who are the women of real influence
in America? They are the schoolteachers, through whose hands each
successive American generation has to pass; they are those wives of public
men who share their husbands' labor, and help mould their work; they are
those women who, through their personal eloquence or through the press, are
distinctly influencing the American people in its growth. The influence of
such women is felt for good or for evil in every page they print, every
newspaper column they fill: the individual women may be unworthy their
posts, but it is they who have got hold of the lever, and gone the right
way to work. As American society is constituted, the largest "social
success" that can be attained here is trivial and local; and you have to
"make believe very hard," like that other imaginary Marchioness, to find in
it any career worth mentioning. That is the foam, but these other women are
dealing with the main currents.