IV

But it is of the intellectual and social value of the club that I

wish more especially to speak here. It is often asked by thoughtful

foreigners why American women, who are free to pursue any career they

like, with ample privileges of education and the universal reign of the

literary club, have produced no writers of the first order, measured

even by the standards of their own sex. One finds many clever ones, and

a few able ones, but no Jane Austen, no George Eliot, no Mme. de Staël,

no Mrs. Browning. This may be partly due to the fact that we have not

yet passed the period of going to school. It is possible that another

generation, reared in the stimulating atmosphere of this, may give

us some rare flower of genius, if its mental force be not weakened by

the general pouring-in process, or dissipated in the modern tendency

toward limitless expansion and dilution. But club life in itself is not

directly favorable to creative genius. The qualities of the imagination

never flourish in crowds, though a certain order of talent does

flourish there--a talent that brings quicker returns and more immediate

consideration, at far less cost. The salon made brilliant and versatile

women who were noted for conversation and diplomacy; it made charming

women who ruled men and affairs through rare gifts of administration,

tempered with intelligent sympathy and tact; it made executive women,

and finely critical women, and masterful women, who left a strong and

lasting impression upon the national life: but, though they lived in

the main intellectual current of their time, stimulated and inspired

its leaders, and had much to do with its direction, they seldom made a

serious effort in literature themselves. The few who have left a name

in letters only illustrate the fact that individual genius is a flower

of another growth. Mme. de Staël would have been a great woman under

any conditions; but we owe all of her best work in literature to her

exile from the social life of Paris, where her thoughts had no time

to crystallize. The gift of Mme. de Sévigné was nearly allied to a

conversational one, but her mind was matured and deepened during years

of seclusion under the lonely skies of Brittany. Mme. de la Fayette

left the world of the salons early, to find her literary inspiration

in the solitude of ill health and the stimulating friendship of La

Rochefoucauld. Mme. du Châtelet, whose talent was of another color,

wrote on philosophy and translated Newton, not in the breezy air of

the salons, but in the tranquil shades of Cirey and the less tranquil

society of Voltaire. There were other women who wrote, though they

usually chose to hide a light which was not a very brilliant one, and

to shine in other ways. It may be that it was the salon which made

these women possible, as it created an intellectual atmosphere in which

thought blossomed into intense and vivid life; but its direct tendency

was to foster in women talents of a quite different sort from creative

ones. It developed to a high degree, however, the fine discrimination

and critical sense which led Rousseau to say that “a point of morals

would not be better discussed in a society of philosophers than in that

of a pretty woman of Paris.”

The clubs have hardly lived long enough to justify a final judgment as

to their outcome; but the best writers of our own time have not been,

as a rule, actively identified with them, though a few, whose minds

were already formed in another school, have had much to do in founding

and leading them. The many able women who have given their time and

talents to the clubs have oftener merged their literary gifts, if they

had them, into work of another sort, not less valuable in its way, but

less tangible and less individual. It is the work of the general, who

plans, organizes, sifts values, adapts means to definite ends, but who

lives too much in the swift current of affairs to give heed to the

voice of the imagination, or to master the art of literary form which

alone makes for thought a permanent abiding-place.

But if the clubs do not produce great creative writers,--who, after

all, are born, not made,--they furnish a multitude of ready ones, and

an army of readers who are likely to have a dominant voice in the

taste of the next generation. The result is certain to be--indeed, is

already--a voluminous literature. The quantity of a thing, however,

does not insure its fine quality; oftener the reverse. Naturally,

the question of standards becomes one of grave importance, unless we

are ready to accept the rule of the average, which more than offsets

the rise of the lowest by the fall of the highest, with an ultimate

tendency downward. We grow in the direction of our ideals, and these

are measured by the height of our standards. That many of the clubs

have exalted ideals, and are doing a great deal of valuable work, is

not a matter of doubt. It is equally certain that some of them work

with a zeal that is not according to knowledge, through lack of

capable leaders, and through a fallacy, nowhere so fatal as in art and

letters, that the wish to do a thing is equivalent to a talent for

doing it.

There is no doubt that American women read and discuss books enough. It

may be that we read too many. One may devour books as one does bonbons,

and with little more profit. Nor is there any doubt that we write

papers enough and hear talks enough on every imaginable subject, from

the antediluvians to Imperialism and the Chinese question. To whatever

all this mental activity may lead, it does not always lead to culture,

even of the mind, and I take the word, unqualified, to include much

more. It does lead to a broad diffusion of intelligence, but there is

an essential difference between intelligence and culture. Paradoxical

as it may seem, it is quite possible, in running after the one, to run

away from the other. The woman who belongs to ten or twelve clubs in

order to be of the new age, and to learn enough of all sorts of things

to be able to talk about them, may find her social compensation and a

harmless way of amusing herself, if she likes that sort of amusement;

but if she aims at mental culture, that is another affair. It is not

a matter of facts and phrases and formulas that one goes in search

of, but an inward growth, the result of long and loving companionship

with the best thought of the world, which is not at all the same

thing as a flitting acquaintance with a multitude of subjects, or

the ability to talk glib platitudes about the latest fads in art or

science or literature. Such companionship is found to only a limited

extent in gatherings of any sort; but stimulus and inspiration may be

found there, and here lies the true intellectual value of the club. To

thoughtful and sincere women, who have a certain amount of training and

natural gifts of assimilation, with small facilities for contact with

the thinking world, it is a priceless boon. But to narrow and untrained

intellects that like to flit from one thing to another, content with

a flying glimpse and a telling point or two which will go far toward

making them seem wise to the uninitiated, there are large possibilities

in the way of what we may call imitation culture. It is simply another

outlet for the ambition of the parvenu who puts on costly clothes and

rare jewels in the comfortable assurance that “fine feathers make fine

birds.”

V

It will, I think, be conceded that the special distinction of the

American woman does not lie in her intellect or her learning. Brilliant

gifts and attainments, to a certain point, may indeed be exceptionally

frequent; but they have often been equaled, if not exceeded, in the

past. It lies, rather, in her facility for utilizing knowledge and

adapting it to visible ends. To a combination of many talents has

been added one to make them all available. It is essentially a talent

for “arriving,” in other words, a talent for success, either with or

without intellectual ability of a high order, and consists largely in

a keen insight as to serviceable values, with a marked aptness for

catching salient points and using them to the best advantage. It is

a variation of the same talent that has made our country the wonder

of the century. In men we call it business sagacity, but it may find

an outlet in many other channels besides the amassing of fortunes. In

women we call it cleverness, and its shades are endless. It makes the

success of the philanthropist, the leader, and the administrator of the

household, as well as the fortune of the social aspirant, and sometimes

of the charlatan. In itself it has no ethical quality. It is simply

an instrument, and its value depends upon the end for which it is

used. But the result of it is that no women in the world have so much

versatility, or make a little knowledge go so far.

On the social side this talent is invaluable, and it is one of the

most piquant charms of the American woman, when the sharp corners of

provincialism are rubbed off. On the intellectual side, however, though

it gives an adaptable quality to genuine scholarship, it drifts easily

into superficiality and affectation. I do not mean to say that the club

is responsible for the fact that a hundred charlatans follow in the

wake of every real talent, as a hundred Tartufes in the wake of every

saint--when saints are in fashion; but it _is_ responsible when

it takes a bit of colored glass for a gem. It is sure, also, to suffer

from the pretension of those who illy represent it. The salon, which

made things of the intellect a fashion, received its worst blow in the

house of its friends. Madelon, in “Les Précieuses Ridicules,” looked

upon life as a failure if she chanced to miss the last romance, or

portrait, or madrigal, or sonnet; and Cathos declared that she should

die of shame if any one asked her about something new which she had

not seen. The pen of Molière sketched the crude copy of a fine thing

in colors too vivid to be mistaken, and henceforth the copy stood for

the thing. The world had its undiscriminating laugh at the salons;

good taste blushed at the company in which it found itself; and the

interests of intelligent women were put back for a generation. It was

not the first time that a good cause has suffered from its too zealous

followers, nor is it likely to be the last. The world moves in circles,

even if there be a spiral tendency upward, as the optimists amiably

assure us.

Doubtless we fancy ourselves much wiser than those seventeenth-century

précieuses whose imitators did them so much harm. Certainly we put more

seriousness into our pretensions. But we have our own little faults and

affectations, though they are not precisely the same. We do not devote

ourselves to portraits, or sonnets, or madrigals. We do not moralize in

maxims, good or bad, nor do we pretend to be sentimental; indeed, we

pretend not to be, if we are. Sentiment is out of fashion. The modern

Philaminte may look with chilling pity upon her belated sister who

has the courage to like Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, when she ought to

prefer Ibsen and the symbolists; but she is not likely to faint at a

common word, or dismiss her cook for a solecism. Our foibles are of

quite another sort. Instead of painting little pictures on a small

canvas, we take a very large canvas and pad our pictures to fit it. We

do not map out the passions on a _carte du tendre_, or give our

valuable time to the discussion of a high-flown Platonism which cradles

a woman in rose-leaves, while her lover waits for her a dozen years

or so because it is vulgar to marry; but we map out the fields of the

intellect, extending from protoplasm to the fixed stars, and undertake

to traverse the whole as confidently as we start for a morning walk.

If we cannot get over the ground fast enough, we can take an electric

train and catch flying glimpses sufficient to give us a pleasant

consciousness of being intelligent and quite modern.

Such vast aims are, no doubt, praiseworthy, and reflect great credit

on the clubs which have demonstrated so clearly the expansive quality

of the feminine mind; but they are also fatiguing, and suggest the

possibility that these same clubs are pushing us a little too fast

and too far. One is often forced to the conclusion that we should do

more if we did not try to do quite so much. It is very well to follow

Emerson’s advice to “hitch your wagon to a star”; but he never proposed

hitching it to all the constellations at once. When I hear the Greek

poets, the Italian painters, the English novelists, and the German

masters disposed of at a symposium in a single afternoon, as I did not

long ago, I wonder if the rare quality of mental distinction which made

the glory of the Immortals will exist at all in the future; whether we

shall not build tents for our thoughts instead of temples; whether,

indeed, the finest flavor of thought will not be as hopelessly lost as

the perfume of the flowers that are scattered in indiscriminate heaps

along the highways to show their quantity.

Nor is there less danger in attempting too large things than too

many things. It is certainly courageous for a woman who knows little

of history, less of philosophy, and nothing at all about the art of

writing, to undertake the Herculean task of preparing a paper on “The

Pagan Philosophers and their Schools.” With the best efforts, she will

have only a few outlines of facts and second-hand opinions, which might

have a certain value if either she or her audience proposed to fill

them out. But this is precisely what the modern woman who wishes to

know a little of everything has no time to do, even if she have the

inclination. There is to be a similar outline of Greek literature the

next week, one of the middle ages the week after, and so on to the end

of the season, when she has a fine collection of skeletons, with no

flesh and blood on any of them, if, indeed, the skeletons themselves

have not vanished into thin air. The Forty Immortals would shrink with

dismay from the magnitude of such a scheme. The worst of it is that one

comes to have a false sense of perspective, and to judge works of the

intellect by their size instead of their quality--like the pretentious

but ignorant woman who gravely remarked, after hearing a brilliant

talk from a brilliant man on Irish wit, that she “did not find it very

improving.” There is, too, the natural result of calling things by the

wrong names, and mistaking the thinnest of veneering for culture.

It is by no means necessary, or even desirable, that every woman

belonging to a club should be a savante; indeed, considering the

number of the clubs, I am not sure that this would not bring about a

more deplorable state of affairs than if there were none at all. It

may even be better for the average woman to know a little about many

things than all about one thing, if she has a certain discrimination

as to values, and the fine sense of proportion which is the result of

more or less mental training. But it _is_ desirable that each one

should have at least a little knowledge of what she undertakes to write

or talk about. Why a woman who might have something to say concerning

certain phases of our colonial life should be asked to write a paper

on Greek art, of which she has not even read, much less thought, or

one who is more or less familiar with various pleasant corners of

English literature should be called upon to entertain her hearers

on the Italian Renaissance, of which she knows nothing whatever, is

one of the mysteries of the new era. “I am so glad to see you,” said

one woman to a friend whom she met on the street. “I have a paper to

write on the symbolists. You know all about such things. What are the

symbolists, anyway?” We are told that when the blind lead the blind,

both are likely to come to grief. It is needless to say that these

faults are not universal, as there is a great deal of careful study and

fine thought in the clubs, but they are sufficiently common to be noted

among things to be avoided.

A still more serious danger lies in the endless multiplication of

clubs, which offers an irresistible temptation to those who like to

cull a little here, and a little there, without too exacting effort

in any direction. They may all be valuable in themselves, but because

it is good to belong to one or two active clubs of different aims,

it does not follow that it is good to belong to a dozen; and I know

of a woman who claims with pride that she belongs to twenty-two!

“Moderation is the charm of life,” said Jean Paul, and one sees with

regret how little of that sort of charm there is left; indeed, I am

not sure that it has not ceased to be considered a charm. We may find

a note of warning in the later days of the great salons. The social

life of the eighteenth century reads like a page of our own, with its

whirl of _conversazioni_, its talks on science, its experiments

in chemistry, physiology, psychology, its mania for discussing

literature, art, and philosophy. The literary salons had blossomed

into great centers of intellectual brilliancy, of which all this life

was the natural pendant. It was the fashion then, as now, for women to

concern themselves with affairs of state; to talk of the rights of man,

though they had less to say than we have about the rights of woman; to

dream of a social millennium, which they were doomed to wade through

rivers of blood without reaching. They too invaded the secrets of the

laboratory, and even the surgeon’s domain. We hear of a young countess

who carried a skeleton in her trunk when she went on a journey, “as

one might carry a book to read,” in order to study anatomy. These

women, like ourselves, aimed to know a little of everything. They too

were fired with the passion for intelligence and the passion for

multitudes. With the craving for novelties came the ever-growing need

of a stronger spice to make them palatable. In this carnival of the

mind they lost their faith and simplicity, loved with their brains

instead of their hearts, forgot their natural duties, and found natural

ties irksome. Longing for rest without the power to rest, they suffered

from maladies of the nerves, and were devoured with the ennui of

exhaustion. Life lost its equilibrium, and the result was inevitable.

The reaction from the restlessness of an intellect that is not fed from

inner sources, but finds its stimulus and theater alike in the world,

was toward an exaggeration of the sensibilities. “If I could become

calm, I should believe myself on a wheel,” said one whose brilliancy

had dazzled a generation. This fatal “too much” was not the least of

the causes that lost to women the empire they had won. All movements

are measured, in the end, by a standard of common sense, and reactions

are in proportion to the deviation from a just mean. The revolution

which brought liberty to men, or at least shifted the burdens to

some one else, deprived women of what they had. They were forbidden

to organize, and sent back to the fireside and cradles. The republic

swept away from them the last vestige of political power, and gave them

nothing in the place of their lost social kingdom. They were forced to

speak with hushed voices in hidden coteries. Of these there were always

a few, but their prestige was gone. “There is one thing which is not

French,” said Napoleon; “it is that a woman can do as she pleases.” And

he proceeded straightway to give point to his theory by exiling the

ablest woman in France and silencing all the rest.

We are apt to take high moral ground on the frivolity of these women,

and to pride ourselves on our superiority because we have such a

serious way of amusing ourselves--so serious, indeed, that we forget

there can be anything so questionable as frivolity about it. To be

sure, the clubs are free from many of the faults of the salons. They do

not put social conventions in the place of principles, nor substitute

an esthetic conscience for an ethical one; nor do they drift at all in

the direction of moral laxity. A movement of the intellect, too, which

has its roots in the character is more likely to last than one that

hangs on the suffrage of those it was meant to please and glorify. But

we have the same mental unrest, the same thirst for excitement, the

same feverish activity, the same indisposition to stay at home with

our thoughts. A fever of the intellect may be preferable to a fever

of the senses, and less harmful as an epidemic, but it tends equally

toward exhaustion and disintegration. It is not so much a question of

morals as a question of balance. The modern fashion, however, of doing

everything, even to thinking, in masses, is not altogether due to a

fever of the intellect, any more than it was a hundred years ago. Much

of it is doubtless due to a genuine love of knowledge, much of it to

a haunting desire to be doing something in the outside world, though

the thing done be possibly not at all worth the doing; but a great

deal of it is due to a sort of hyperæsthesia of the social sentiment,

or the mental restlessness that betrays a lack of poise and depth in

the character. We call it the spirit of the age--the innocent phantom

which has to bear the burden of most of our sins, and is gathering

so resistless a force that the strongest and wisest are swept along,

despite themselves, in its accelerating course. But the spirit of the

age is only the sum of individual forces. It needs only a sufficient

number of wise counter-forces to temper and modify it.