FOR reasons which many persons thought ridiculous, Mrs. Lightfoot Lee
decided to pass the winter in Washington. She was in excellent health,
but she said that the climate would do her good. In New York she had
troops of friends, but she suddenly became eager to see again the very
small number of those who lived on the Potomac. It was only to her
closest intimates that she honestly acknowledged herself to be tortured
by ennui. Since her husband's death, five years before, she had lost
her taste for New York society; she had felt no interest in the price
of stocks, and very little in the men who dealt in them; she had become
serious. What was it all worth, this wilderness of men and women as
monotonous as the brown stone houses they lived in? In her despair
she had resorted to desperate measures. She had read philosophy in the
original German, and the more she read, the more she was disheartened
that so much culture should lead to nothing--nothing.
After talking of Herbert Spencer for an entire evening with a very
literary transcendental commission-merchant, she could not see that her
time had been better employed than when in former days she had passed it
in flirting with a very agreeable young stock-broker; indeed, there
was an evident proof to the contrary, for the flirtation might lead to
something--had, in fact, led to marriage; while the philosophy could
lead to nothing, unless it were perhaps to another evening of the
same kind, because transcendental philosophers are mostly elderly men,
usually married, and, when engaged in business, somewhat apt to be
sleepy towards evening. Nevertheless Mrs. Lee did her best to turn her
study to practical use. She plunged into philanthropy, visited prisons,
inspected hospitals, read the literature of pauperism and crime,
saturated herself with the statistics of vice, until her mind had nearly
lost sight of virtue. At last it rose in rebellion against her, and
she came to the limit of her strength. This path, too, seemed to lead
nowhere. She declared that she had lost the sense of duty, and that, so
far as concerned her, all the paupers and criminals in New York might
henceforward rise in their majesty and manage every railway on the
continent. Why should she care? What was the city to her? She could
find nothing in it that seemed to demand salvation. What gave peculiar
sanctity to numbers? Why were a million people, who all resembled each
other, any way more interesting than one person? What aspiration could
she help to put into the mind of this great million-armed monster that
would make it worth her love or respect? Religion? A thousand powerful
churches were doing their best, and she could see no chance for a
new faith of which she was to be the inspired prophet. Ambition? High
popular ideals? Passion for whatever is lofty and pure? The very words
irritated her. Was she not herself devoured by ambition, and was she not
now eating her heart out because she could find no one object worth a
sacrifice?
Was it ambition--real ambition--or was it mere restlessness that
made Mrs. Lightfoot Lee so bitter against New York and Philadelphia,
Baltimore and Boston, American life in general and all life in
particular? What did she want? Not social position, for she herself was
an eminently respectable Philadelphian by birth; her father a famous
clergyman; and her husband had been equally irreproachable, a descendant
of one branch of the Virginia Lees, which had drifted to New York in
search of fortune, and had found it, or enough of it to keep the young
man there. His widow had her own place in society which no one disputed.
Though not brighter than her neighbours, the world persisted in classing
her among clever women; she had wealth, or at least enough of it to give
her all that money can give by way of pleasure to a sensible woman in an
American city; she had her house and her carriage; she dressed well; her
table was good, and her furniture was never allowed to fall behind the
latest standard of decorative art. She had travelled in Europe, and
after several visits, covering some years of time, had returned home,
carrying in one hand, as it were, a green-grey landscape, a remarkably
pleasing specimen of Corot, and in the other some bales of Persian and
Syrian rugs and embroideries, Japanese bronzes and porcelain. With this
she declared Europe to be exhausted, and she frankly avowed that she was
American to the tips of her fingers; she neither knew nor greatly cared
whether America or Europe were best to live in; she had no violent love
for either, and she had no objection to abusing both; but she meant to
get all that American life had to offer, good or bad, and to drink it
down to the dregs, fully determined that whatever there was in it
she would have, and that whatever could be made out of it she would
manufacture. “I know,” said she, “that America produces petroleum and
pigs; I have seen both on the steamers; and I am told it produces silver
and gold. There is choice enough for any woman.”
Yet, as has been already said, Mrs. Lee's first experience was not a
success. She soon declared that New York might represent the petroleum
or the pigs, but the gold of life was not to be discovered there by her
eyes.
Not but that there was variety enough; a variety of people, occupations,
aims, and thoughts; but that all these, after growing to a certain
height, stopped short. They found nothing to hold them up. She knew,
more or less intimately, a dozen men whose fortunes ranged between one
million and forty millions. What did they do with their money? What
could they do with it that was different from what other men did? After
all, it is absurd to spend more money than is enough to satisfy all
one's wants; it is vulgar to live in two houses in the same street, and
to drive six horses abreast. Yet, after setting aside a certain income
sufficient for all one's wants, what was to be done with the rest? To
let it accumulate was to own one's failure; Mrs. Lee's great grievance
was that it did accumulate, without changing or improving the quality
of its owners. To spend it in charity and public works was doubtless
praiseworthy, but was it wise? Mrs. Lee had read enough political
economy and pauper reports to be nearly convinced that public work
should be public duty, and that great benefactions do harm as well as
good.
And even supposing it spent on these objects, how could it do more than
increase and perpetuate that same kind of human nature which was her
great grievance? Her New York friends could not meet this question
except by falling back upon their native commonplaces, which she
recklessly trampled upon, averring that, much as she admired the genius
of the famous traveller, Mr. Gulliver, she never had been able, since
she became a widow, to accept the Brobdingnagian doctrine that he who
made two blades of grass grow where only one grew before deserved better
of mankind than the whole race of politicians. She would not find fault
with the philosopher had he required that the grass should be of an
improved quality; “but,” said she, “I cannot honestly pretend that I
should be pleased to see two New York men where I now see one; the idea
is too ridiculous; more than one and a half would be fatal to me.”
Then came her Boston friends, who suggested that higher education was
precisely what she wanted; she should throw herself into a crusade for
universities and art-schools. Mrs. Lee turned upon them with a sweet
smile; “Do you know,” said she, “that we have in New York already the
richest university in America, and that its only trouble has always been
that it can get no scholars even by paying for them? Do you want me to
go out into the streets and waylay boys? If the heathen refuse to be
converted, can you give me power over the stake and the sword to compel
them to come in? And suppose you can? Suppose I march all the boys in
Fifth Avenue down to the university and have them all properly taught
Greek and Latin, English literature, ethics, and German philosophy.
What then? You do it in Boston. Now tell me honestly what comes of it. I
suppose you have there a brilliant society; numbers of poets, scholars,
philosophers, statesmen, all up and down Beacon Street. Your evenings
must be sparkling. Your press must scintillate. How is it that we New
Yorkers never hear of it? We don't go much into your society; but when
we do, it doesn't seem so very much better than our own. You are just
like the rest of us. You grow six inches high, and then you stop. Why
will not somebody grow to be a tree and cast a shadow?”
The average member of New York society, although not unused to this
contemptuous kind of treatment from his leaders, retaliated in his
blind, common-sense way. “What does the woman want?” he said. “Is her
head turned with the Tulieries and Marlborough House? Does she think
herself made for a throne? Why does she not lecture for women's rights?
Why not go on the stage? If she cannot be contented like other people,
what need is there for abusing us just because she feels herself no
taller than we are? What does she expect to get from her sharp tongue?
What does she know, any way?”
Mrs. Lee certainly knew very little. She had read voraciously and
promiscuously one subject after another. Ruskin and Taine had danced
merrily through her mind, hand in hand with Darwin and Stuart Mill,
Gustave Droz and Algernon Swinburne. She had even laboured over the
literature of her own country. She was perhaps, the only woman in New
York who knew something of American history. Certainly she could not
have repeated the list of Presidents in their order, but she knew that
the Constitution divided the government into Executive, Legislative, and
Judiciary; she was aware that the President, the Speaker, and the
Chief Justice were important personages, and instinctively she wondered
whether they might not solve her problem; whether they were the shade
trees which she saw in her dreams.
Here, then, was the explanation of her restlessness, discontent,
ambition,--call it what you will. It was the feeling of a passenger on
an ocean steamer whose mind will not give him rest until he has been in
the engine-room and talked with the engineer. She wanted to see with her
own eyes the action of primary forces; to touch with her own hand the
massive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity
of the motive power. She was bent upon getting to the heart of the great
American mystery of democracy and government. She cared little where
her pursuit might lead her, for she put no extravagant value upon life,
having already, as she said, exhausted at least two lives, and being
fairly hardened to insensibility in the process. “To lose a husband and
a baby,” said she, “and keep one's courage and reason, one must become
very hard or very soft. I am now pure steel. You may beat my heart with
a trip-hammer and it will beat the trip-hammer back again.”
Perhaps after exhausting the political world she might try again
elsewhere; she did not pretend to say where she might then go, or what
she should do; but at present she meant to see what amusement there
might be in politics.
Her friends asked what kind of amusement she expected to find among
the illiterate swarm of ordinary people who in Washington represented
constituencies so dreary that in comparison New York was a New
Jerusalem, and Broad Street a grove of Academe. She replied that if
Washington society were so bad as this, she should have gained all she
wanted, for it would be a pleasure to return,--precisely the feeling she
longed for. In her own mind, however, she frowned on the idea of
seeking for men. What she wished to see, she thought, was the clash
of interests, the interests of forty millions of people and a whole
continent, centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled,
or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the
tremendous forces of government, and the machinery of society, at work.
What she wanted, was POWER.
Perhaps the force of the engine was a little confused in her mind with
that of the engineer, the power with the men who wielded it. Perhaps the
human interest of politics was after all what really attracted her, and,
however strongly she might deny it, the passion for exercising power,
for its own sake, might dazzle and mislead a woman who had exhausted all
the ordinary feminine resources. But why speculate about her motives?
The stage was before her, the curtain was rising, the actors were ready
to enter; she had only to go quietly on among the supernumeraries and
see how the play was acted and the stage effects were produced; how the
great tragedians mouthed, and the stage-manager swore.