pall of depression has settled, that face very likely is bent over the
comic pictures in the evening paper. I cannot recall seeing any one
smile over these long serials of humorous adventure which run from day
to day and from year to year. I have seen readers turn mechanically to
these lurid comics and pore over them, foreheads puckered into a frown,
lips unconsciously spelling out the long legends which issue in the form
of little balloons and lozenges from that amazing portrait gallery of
dwarfs, giants, shrilling viragos and their diminutive husbands,
devil-children, quadrupeds, insects,--an entire zoölogy. If any stimulus
rises from these pages to the puzzled brain, the effect is not visible.
I imagine that by dint of repetition through the years these grotesque
creations have become a reality to millions of readers. It is no longer
a question of humor, it is a vice. The Desperate Desmonds, the
Newly-weds, and the Dingbats, have acquired a horrible fascination.
Otherwise I cannot see why readers of the funny page should appear to be
memorizing pages from Euclid.
This by way of anticipation. What the doctor has said of exercise being
a habit which grows easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes
of walking that are wearisome. I find myself strolling past Fourteenth
Street, where I was to take my train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind,
Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now on a different Broadway.
The crowd is no longer north and south, but flows in every direction. It
is churned up at every corner and spreads itself across the squares and
open places. Its appearance has changed. It is no longer a factory
population. Women still predominate, but they are the women of the
professions and trades which centre about Madison Square--business women
of independent standing, women from the magazine offices, the publishing
houses, the insurance offices. You detect the bachelor girl in the
current which sets in toward the home quarters of the undomesticated,
the little Bohemias, the foreign eating-places whose fixed _table
d'hôte_ prices flash out in illumined signs from the side streets. Still
farther north and the crowd becomes tinged with the current of that
Broadway which the outside world knows best. The idlers begin to mingle
with the workers, men in English clothes with canes, women with plumes
and jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat of Little Old New
York.
The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die down as quickly almost as
they manifested themselves. The idlers and those who minister to them
have heard the call of the dinner hour and have vanished, into hotel
doors, into shabbier quarters by no means in keeping with the cut of
their garments and their apparent indifference to useful employment.
Soon the street is almost empty. It is not a beautiful Broadway in this
garish interval between the last of the matinée and shopping crowd and
the vanguard of the night crowd. The monster electric sign-boards have
not begun to gleam and flash and revolve and confound the eye and the
senses. At night the electric Niagara hides the squalid fronts of ugly
brick, the dark doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety
wooden hoardings. Not an imperial street this Broadway at 6.30 of a
summer's afternoon. Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops,
cheap haberdasheries, cheap restaurants, grimy little newspaper agencies
and ticket-offices, and 'demonstration' stores for patent foods, patent
waters, patent razors.
O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the fast-fading light, before
the magic hand of Edison wipes the wrinkles from your face and
galvanizes you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with your tinsel
shop windows, with your puffy-faced, unshaven men leaning against
door-posts and chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed newsboys
wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin, and your itinerant women whose
eyes wander from side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw the
hearts of millions to yourself, O dingy, Gay White Way, O Via Lobsteria
Dolorosa!
Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time to go home. I have walked
farther than I intended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and tired.
The romance of the crowd has disappeared. Romance cannot survive that
short passage of Longacre Square, where the art of the theatre and of
the picture-postcard flourish in an atmosphere impregnated with
gasolene. As I glance into the windows of the automobile salesrooms and
catch my own reflection in the enamel of Babylonian limousines I find
myself thinking all at once of the children at home. They expand and
fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. I smile into the face of a
painted promenader, but how is she to know that it is not at her I smile
but at the sudden recollection of what the baby said at the
breakfast-table that morning? Like all good New Yorkers when they enter
the Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses against contact with the
external world, and thus resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip
down into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time I am spewed out
two short blocks from Belshazzar Court.
Fashions in Men
By Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Never, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction
reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of
precipitate of human nature--_Don Quixote_ and _Tom Jones_ are equally
'true' and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern books give us
every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, if
read at all, may be too 'quaint' for words. And to any one who has been
reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that
fashions in human nature have changed.
My first novel was _Jane Eyre_; and at the age of eight, I fell
desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve
better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary
little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in
being permitted to encounter the classics in infancy), and I dare say
that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to some
imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should
have fallen in love--had time and chance permitted--with 'V. V.' or The
Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer
assume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever
age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men
in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit
the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as
modern tactics direct the assault.
People are always telling us that fashions in women have changed: what
seems to me almost more interesting is that fashions in men (the stable
sex) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very
newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore 'up
to' the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in
love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not
only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day
are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.
It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has
sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. Gone
are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn, and
Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady
Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curaçao and pâté de foie gras. No
longer does Blanche Ingram declare, 'An English hero of the road would
be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only be
surpassed by a Levantine pirate.' Blanche Ingram wants--and gets--the
Humanitarian Hero; some one who has particular respect for convicts and
fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolstoï. He must qualify for
the possession of her hand by long, voluntary residence in the slums; he
may inherit ancestral acres only if he has, concerning them, socialistic
intentions. He must be too altruistic to kill grouse, and if he is to be
wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to eat them. He must never order
'pistols and coffee': his only permitted weapon is benevolent
legislation.
I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop--'muscular Christianity' has
at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of
condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands. And he
should have the tongue of men and of angels. Gone is the inarticulate
Guardsman--gone forever. The modern hero has read books that Burgo
Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never heard of. He is
ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, until
dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of sex until the heroine
arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is a very complicated and
interesting creature. Some mediæval traits are discernible in him; but
the eighteenth century would not have known him for human.
What has he lost, this hero, and what has he gained? How did it all
begin? In life, doubtless, it began with a feminine change of taste.
Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; and, I suspect, the peacock's
tail, as much as the anthropoid ape's, is destined to elimination. We
women of to-day are distrustful of the peacock's tail. We are mortally
afraid of being misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that the
peacock's soul is not quite the thing. Never has there been among the
feminine young more scientific talk about sex, and never among the
feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young woman
suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably discussed
with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery, eugenics, and
race-suicide. The miracle--the everlasting miracle of Nature--is that
she should want, in these circumstances, to marry him at all. She
probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her
satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the
peacock's tail to do?
So much for life. In our English fiction, I am inclined to believe that
George Eliot began it with Daniel Deronda. But, in our own day, Meredith
did more. Up to the time of Meredith, the dominant male was the
fashionable hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Fairfax
Rochester, and 'Stunning' Warrington are as different as possible; but
all of them, in their several ways, keep up one male tradition in
fiction. It is within our own day that that tradition has entirely
changed. Have you ever noticed how inveterately, in Meredith's novels,
the schoolmaster or his spiritual kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont
cannot stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleetwood against Owain Wythan,
Sir Willoughby Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little girl who
fell in love with Mr. Rochester would have preferred any one of these
gentlemen (yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but I dare say the
event would have proved her wrong. Certainly the wisdom of the ladies'
choice was never doubtful to Meredith himself. The soldier and the
aristocrat cannot endure the test they are put to by the sympathetic
male with a penchant for the enfranchised woman. Vain for Lord Ormont to
accede to Aminta's taste for publicity; vain for Lord Fleetwood to
become the humble wooer of Carinthia Jane: each has previously been
convicted of pride.
Now, in an earlier day, no woman would have looked at a man who was not
proud--who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, by which Lucifer
fell, was the chief hall-mark of the gentleman. Moreover, in that
earlier day, women did not expect their heroes to explain everything to
them: a certain amount of reticence, a measure of silence, was also one
of the hallmarks of the gentleman. If a bit of mystery could be thrown
in, so much the better. It gave her something to exercise her
imagination on. Think of the Byronic males--Conrad, Lara, and the rest!
If they had told all, where would they have been? Think of Lovelace and
Heathcote and Darcy and Brian de Bois Guilbert!
Heroes, once, were always disdaining to speak, and spurning their foes.
Nowadays, no hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures to spurn
anyone--least of all, his foes. He is humble of heart and very
loquacious. Mrs. Humphry Ward has inherited from George Eliot; and the
latest heroes of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are the
children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, and Owain Wythan (of whom it
is not explicitly written that they had any others). They are
humanitarian and democratic; they are ignorant of hatred; they are
inclined to think the ill-born necessarily better than the well-born;
and they are quite sure that women are superior to men. True, Mr.
Galsworthy always seems to be looking backward; he never forgets the
ancient tradition that he is combating. His young aristocrats who eschew
the ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in their case is 'its
only reward.' Perhaps that is why his novels always leave us with the
medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. But take a handful of
heroes elsewhere: the Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict,'Daniel
Smith,' 'V. V.', or even Coryston, the Socialist peer. Where, in the lot
of them do you find either pride or reticence in the old sense? Where,
in any one of them, do you find the Satanic charm? Which one would
Harriet Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, or Elizabeth
Bennett, have looked at with eyes of love?
The 'Satanic charm.' The phrase is out. Milton, I suspect, is
responsible for the tradition that has lasted so long, and is now being
broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan delightful, and our good
Protestant novelists for a long time followed his lead, in that they
gave their delightful men some of the Satanic traits. Proud they were
and scornfully silent, as we have recalled; and conventional to the last
degree. 'Conventional,' that is, in the stricter sense; by which it is
not meant that as portraits they were unconvincing, or that, as men,
they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They were conventional in that they
followed a convention; in that they were, to a large extent, predicable.
They were jealous of their honor, and believed it vindicable by the
duel; they had no doubt that good women were better than bad, and that
pedigree in human beings was as important as pedigree in animals; and
though they might be quixotic on occasion, they were not democratic
_pour deux sous_. The barmaid was not their sister, nor the stevedore
their brother. (The Satan of _Paradise Lost_, as we all remember, was a
splendid snob.)
Moreover, they were sophisticated--and not merely out of books. The
Faust idea, having prevailed for many centuries, has at last been
abandoned--and perhaps, our sober sense may tell us, rightly; but not so
long ago there was still something more repellent to the female
imagination about the man who chose not to know than about the man who
chose not to abstain. I do not mean that we were supposed always to be
looking for a Tom Jones or a Roderick Random--we might be looking for a
Sir Charles Grandison, no less; but at least, when we found our hero, we
expected to find him wiser than we. Nowadays, a girl rather likes to
give a man points--and often (in fiction, at least) has to. Meredith
railed against the 'veiled virginal doll' as heroine. Well: our heroines
now are never veiled virginal dolls; but sometimes our heroes are.
Lancelot has gone out, and Galahad has come in. I suspect that there is
a literary law of compensation, and that, Ibsen and Strindberg to the
contrary notwithstanding, there has to be a veiled virginal doll
somewhere in a really taking romance. Perhaps it is fair that the
sterner sex should have its turn at guarding ideals by the hearthstone,
while women make the grand tour.
Let me not be misunderstood. I am not referring particularly to that
knowledge which any man is better without, but to the Odyssean
experience which, in their respective measures, heroes were wont to have
behind them:--
And saw the cities, and the counsels knew
. . . . . . . .
Of many men, and many a time at sea
Within his heart he bore calamity.
They had at least seen the towns and the minds of men, and their morals
were the less likely to be upset by a conventional assault upon them.
Does any one chance to remember, I wonder, Theron Ware, led to his
'damnation' by his first experience of a Chopin nocturne? It would have
taken more than a Chopin nocturne to make any of our seasoned heroes do
something that he did not wish to. They knew something of society, and
_ergo_ of women; they had experienced, directly or vicariously, human
romance; and they had read history. Nowadays, they are apt to know
little or nothing--to begin with--of society, women, or romance, except
what may be got from brand-new books on sociology; and they pride
themselves on knowing no history. History, with its eternal stresses and
selections, is nothing if not aristocratic, and our heroes nowadays must
be democratic or they die. It is an age of complete faith in the
superiority of the lower classes--the swing of the pendulum, no doubt,
from the other extreme of thinking the lower classes morally and
æsthetically negligible. 'Privilege' is as detestable now in matters of
intellect and breeding as in matters of finance and politics. The man
with the muck-rake has got past the office into the drawing-room. If
your hero has the bad luck not to have been born in the slums, he must
at least have the wit to take up his habitation there as soon as he
comes of age. We have learned that riches are corrupting, but (except in
the special sense of vice-commission reports) we have not yet learned
that poverty is rather more corrupting than wealth.
Sophistication, whether social, intellectual, or æsthetic, is now the
deadly sin. If we are sophisticated, we may not be good enough for Ellis
Island. And there goes another of the hallmarks of the gentleman as he
was once known to fiction. Our hero in old days might not have
condescended to the glittering assemblies of fashion, but there was
never any doubt that, if he had, he would, in spite of himself, have
been king of his company as soon as he entered the room. He might have
been hard up, but his necktie would not have been 'a black sea holding
for life a school of fat white fish.' He might have been lonely or
gloomy, but he would not have been diffident, and he would never, never,
_never_ have 'blinked' at the heroine. 'My godlike friend had carelessly
put his hair-brush into the butter' says Asticot, at the outset, of the
Beloved Vagabond. Now in picaresque novels, we were always meeting
people who did that sort of thing; but they were not gentlemen. Whereas,
the Beloved Vagabond is of noble birth, and despite his ten years'
abeyance, finds the countess quite ready to marry him. She does not
marry him in the end, to be sure, but we are permitted to feel that
there was something lacking in her because Paragot's manners at tea did
not please her.
The hero of old had what used to be called 'a sense of fitness,' and a
saving sense of humor, which combined to prevent his entering a ballroom
as John the Baptist. The same lucky combination would have prevented
him--in literature, at least--from wooing the millionaire's child with
dusty commonplaces of the Higher Criticism or jeremiads against the
daughters of Heth. But perhaps millionaires' children to-day take that
sort of thing for manners. To the argument that a performance of the
kind takes courage, one can only reply that, judging from the enthusiasm
with which the preaching hero is received by the heroine, it apparently
does not. And in any case, the hero is too sublimely ignorant of what
socially constitutes courage to deserve any credit for it.
Sometimes, of course, like Mr. Galsworthy's men, he perceives, with some
inherited sense, that his kind of thing is not likely to be welcomed;
and then he goes sadly and sternly away, leaving the girl to accept a
wooer with more technique. But usually he cuts out everybody. For the
chief hall-mark of a gentleman, now, is the desire to reform his own
class out of all recognition.
Women, as we know, have long wanted to be talked to as if they were men;
and the result is that heroines now let themselves be lectured at in a
way that very few men would endure. Alison Parr marries the Rev. John
Hodder, and Carlisle Heth would have married V. V. if he had lived.
Well: Clara Middleton married Vernon Whitford, and Carinthia Jane
married Owain Wythan, and Aminta married Matey Weyburn.
I may have seemed to be speaking cynically. That, I can give my word of
honor, I am not. It is well that we have come to realize that there are
some adventures which, in themselves, add no lustre to a man's name. It
is well that we take thought for the lower strata of humanity--though
our actual reforms, I fancy, show their authors as taking thought not
for to-morrow but for to-day. Certainly brutality, or the indifference
which is negative brutality, is not a beautiful or a moral thing; and
certainly we do not particularly sympathize with Thackeray shedding
tears as he went away from his publishers because they had obliged him
to save Pendennis's chastity. That dreadful person, Arthur Pendennis,
would surely not have been made any less dreadful by being permitted to
seduce Fanny Bolton.
It is right to think of the poor; it is right to bend our energies, as
citizens, to the economic bettering of their lot. No one could sanely
regret our doing so. But there is always danger in saying the thing
which is not, and in pretending that because some virtues have hitherto
not been recognized, the virtues that have been recognized are no good.
One sympathizes with Towneley (in that incomparable novel _The Way of
All Flesh_) when Ernest asks him,--
'"Don't you like poor people very much yourself?"
'Towneley gave his face a comical but good-natured screw and said
quietly, but slowly and decidedly, "No, no, no," and escaped.
'Of course, some poor people were very nice, and always would be so, but
as though scales had fallen suddenly from his eyes he saw that no one
was nicer for being poor, and that between the upper and lower classes
there was a gulf which amounted practically to an impassable barrier.'
It is a great pity that Samuel Butler did not live longer and write more
novels. But in regretting him, we shall do well to remember that though
publication was delayed until some time after the author's death, the
bulk of _The Way of All Flesh_ was written in the '70's. _The Way of All
Flesh_ is not sympathetic to the contemporary mood; it is one of those
books so much ahead of its time (except perhaps in ecclesiastical
matters) that the time has not yet caught up with it. It was doomed
inevitably to an interval of oblivion. The case reminds one of _Richard
Feverel_.