every phase of the Social World of Paris down to 1850 and Thackeray left
hardly a corner of London High Life unexplored; but so great have been
the changes (progress, its admirers call it,) since then, that, could
Balzac come back to his beloved Paris, he would feel like a foreigner
there; and Thackeray, who was among us but yesterday, would have
difficulty in finding his bearings in the sea of the London world to-day.
We have changed so radically that even a casual observer cannot help
being struck by the difference. Among other most significant "phenomena"
has appeared a phase of life that not only neither of these great men
observed (for the very good reason that it had not appeared in their
time), but which seems also to have escaped the notice of the writers of
our own day, close observers as they are of any new development. I mean
the class of Social Exiles, pitiable wanderers from home and country, who
haunt the Continent, and are to be found (sad little colonies) in out-of-
the-way corners of almost every civilized country.
To know much of this form of modern life, one must have been a wanderer,
like myself, and have pitched his tent in many queer places; for they are
shy game and not easily raised, frequenting mostly quiet old cities like
Versailles and Florence, or inexpensive watering-places where their
meagre incomes become affluence by contrast. The first thought on
dropping in on such a settlement is, "How in the world did these people
ever drift here?" It is simple enough and generally comes about in this
way:
The father of a wealthy family dies. The fortune turns out to be less
than was expected. The widow and children decide to go abroad for a year
or so, during their period of mourning, partially for distraction, and
partially (a fact which is not spoken of) because at home they would be
forced to change their way of living to a simpler one, and that is hard
to do, just at first. Later they think it will be quite easy. So the
family emigrates, and after a little sight-seeing, settles in Dresden or
Tours, casually at first, in a hotel. If there are young children they
are made the excuse. "The languages are so important!" Or else one of
the daughters develops a taste for music, or a son takes up the study of
art. In a year or two, before a furnished apartment is taken, the idea
of returning is discussed, but abandoned "for the present." They begin
vaguely to realize how difficult it will be to take life up again at
home. During all this time their income (like everything else when the
owners are absent) has been slowly but surely disappearing, making the
return each year more difficult. Finally, for economy, an unfurnished
apartment is taken. They send home for bits of furniture and family
belongings, and gradually drop into the great army of the expatriated.
Oh, the pathos of it! One who has not seen these poor stranded waifs in
their self-imposed exile, with eyes turned towards their native land,
cannot realize all the sadness and loneliness they endure, rarely
adopting the country of their residence but becoming more firmly American
as the years go by. The home papers and periodicals are taken, the
American church attended, if there happens to be one; the English chapel,
if there is not. Never a French church! In their hearts they think it
almost irreverent to read the service in French. The acquaintance of a
few fellow-exiles is made and that of a half-dozen English families,
mothers and daughters and a younger son or two, whom the ferocious
primogeniture custom has cast out of the homes of their childhood to
economize on the Continent.
I have in my mind a little settlement of this kind at Versailles, which
was a type. The formal old city, fallen from its grandeur, was a
singularly appropriate setting to the little comedy. There the modest
purses of the exiles found rents within their reach, the quarters vast
and airy. The galleries and the park afforded a diversion, and then
Paris, dear Paris, the American Mecca, was within reach. At the time I
knew it, the colony was fairly prosperous, many of its members living in
the two or three principal _pensions_, the others in apartments of their
own. They gave feeble little entertainments among themselves,
card-parties and teas, and dined about with each other at their
respective _tables d'hote_, even knowing a stray Frenchman or two, whom
the quest of a meal had tempted out of their native fastnesses as it does
the wolves in a hard winter. Writing and receiving letters from America
was one of the principal occupations, and an epistle descriptive of a
particular event at home went the rounds, and was eagerly read and
discussed.
The merits of the different _pensions_ also formed a subject of vital
interest. The advantages and disadvantages of these rival establishments
were, as a topic, never exhausted. _Madame une telle_ gave five o'clock
tea, included in the seven francs a day, but her rival gave one more meat
course at dinner and her coffee was certainly better, while a third
undoubtedly had a nicer set of people. No one here at home can realize
the importance these matters gradually assume in the eyes of the exiles.
Their slender incomes have to be so carefully handled to meet the strain
of even this simple way of living, if they are to show a surplus for a
little trip to the seashore in the summer months, that an extra franc a
day becomes a serious consideration.
Every now and then a family stronger-minded than the others, or with
serious reasons for returning home (a daughter to bring out or a son to
put into business), would break away from its somnolent surroundings and
re-cross the Atlantic, alternating between hope and fear. It is here
that a sad fate awaits these modern Rip Van Winkles. They find their
native cities changed beyond recognition. (For we move fast in these
days.) The mother gets out her visiting list of ten years before and is
thunderstruck to find that it contains chiefly names of the "dead, the
divorced, and defaulted." The waves of a decade have washed over her
place and the world she once belonged to knows her no more. The leaders
of her day on whose aid she counted have retired from the fray. Younger,
and alas! unknown faces sit in the opera boxes and around the dinner
tables where before she had found only friends. After a feeble little
struggle to get again into the "swim," the family drifts back across the
ocean into the quiet back water of a continental town, and goes circling
around with the other twigs and dry leaves, moral flotsam and jetsam,
thrown aside by the great rush of the outside world.
For the parents the life is not too sad. They have had their day, and
are, perhaps, a little glad in their hearts of a quiet old age, away from
the heat and sweat of the battle; but for the younger generation it is
annihilation. Each year their circle grows smaller. Death takes away
one member after another of the family, until one is left alone in a
foreign land with no ties around her, or with her far-away "home," the
latter more a name now than a reality.
A year or two ago I was taking luncheon with our consul at his primitive
villa, an hour's ride from the city of Tangier, a ride made on donkey-
back, as no roads exist in that sunny land. After our coffee and cigars,
he took me a half-hour's walk into the wilderness around him to call on
his nearest neighbors, whose mode of existence seemed a source of anxiety
to him. I found myself in the presence of two American ladies, the
younger being certainly not less than seventy-five. To my astonishment I
found they had been living there some thirty years, since the death of
their parents, in an isolation and remoteness impossible to describe, in
an Arab house, with native servants, "the world forgetting, by the world
forgot." Yet these ladies had names well known in New York fifty years
ago.
The glimpse I had of their existence made me thoughtful as I rode home in
the twilight, across a suburb none too safe for strangers. What had the
future in store for those two? Or, worse still, for the survivor of
those two? In contrast, I saw a certain humble "home" far away in
America, where two old ladies were ending their lives surrounded by
loving friends and relations, honored and cherished and guarded tenderly
from the rude world.
In big cities like Paris and Rome there is another class of the
expatriated, the wealthy who have left their homes in a moment of pique
after the failure of some social or political ambition; and who find in
these centres the recognition refused them at home and for which their
souls thirsted.
It is not to these I refer, although it is curious to see a group of
people living for years in a country of which they, half the time, do not
speak the language (beyond the necessities of housekeeping and shopping),
knowing but few of its inhabitants, and seeing none of the society of the
place, their acquaintance rarely going beyond that equivocal, hybrid
class that surrounds rich "strangers" and hangs on to the outer edge of
the _grand monde_. One feels for this latter class merely contempt, but
one's pity is reserved for the former. What object lessons some lives on
the Continent would be to impatient souls at home, who feel discontented
with their surroundings, and anxious to break away and wander abroad! Let
them think twice before they cut the thousand ties it has taken a
lifetime to form. Better monotony at your own fireside, my friends,
where at the worst, you are known and have your place, no matter how
small, than an old age among strangers.
No. 12--"Seven Ages" of Furniture
The progress through life of active-minded Americans is apt to be a
series of transformations. At each succeeding phase of mental
development, an old skin drops from their growing intelligence, and they
assimilate the ideas and tastes of their new condition, with a facility
and completeness unknown to other nations.
One series of metamorphoses particularly amusing to watch is, that of an
observant, receptive daughter of Uncle Sam who, aided and followed (at a
distance) by an adoring husband, gradually develops her excellent brain,
and rises through fathoms of self-culture and purblind experiment, to the
surface of dilettantism and connoisseurship. One can generally detect
the exact stage of evolution such a lady has reached by the bent of her
conversation, the books she is reading, and, last but not least, by her
material surroundings; no outward and visible signs reflecting inward and
spiritual grace so clearly as the objects people collect around them for
the adornment of their rooms, or the way in which those rooms are
decorated.
A few years ago, when a young man and his bride set up housekeeping on
their own account, the "old people" of both families seized the
opportunity to unload on the beginners (under the pretence of helping
them along) a quantity of furniture and belongings that had (as the
shopkeepers say) "ceased to please" their original owners. The narrow
quarters of the tyros are encumbered by ungainly sofas and arm-chairs,
most probably of carved rosewood. _Etageres_ of the same lugubrious
material grace the corners of their tiny drawing-room, the bits of mirror
inserted between the shelves distorting the image of the owners into
headless or limbless phantoms. Half of their little dining-room is
filled with a black-walnut sideboard, ingeniously contrived to take up as
much space as possible and hold nothing, its graceless top adorned with a
stag's head carved in wood and imitation antlers.
The novices in their innocence live contented amid their hideous
surroundings for a year or two, when the wife enters her second epoch,
which, for want of a better word, we will call the Japanese period. The
grim furniture gradually disappears under a layer of silk and gauze
draperies, the bare walls blossom with paper umbrellas, fans are nailed
in groups promiscuously, wherever an empty space offends her eye. Bows
of ribbon are attached to every possible protuberance of the furniture.
Even the table service is not spared. I remember dining at a house in
this stage of its artistic development, where the marrow bones that
formed one course of the dinner appeared each with a coquettish little
bow-knot of pink ribbon around its neck.
Once launched on this sea of adornment, the housewife soon loses her
bearings and decorates indiscriminately. Her old evening dresses serve
to drape the mantelpieces, and she passes every spare hour embroidering,
braiding, or fringing some material to adorn her rooms. At Christmas her
friends contribute specimens of their handiwork to the collection.
The view of other houses and other decorations before long introduces the
worm of discontent into the blossom of our friend's contentment. The
fruit of her labors becomes tasteless on her lips. As the finances of
the family are satisfactory, the re-arrangement of the parlor floor is
(at her suggestion) confided to a firm of upholsterers, who make a clean
sweep of the rosewood and the bow-knots, and retire, after some months of
labor, leaving the delighted wife in possession of a suite of rooms
glittering with every monstrosity that an imaginative tradesman, spurred
on by unlimited credit, could devise.
The wood work of the doors and mantels is an intricate puzzle of inlaid
woods, the ceilings are panelled and painted in complicated designs. The
"parlor" is provided with a complete set of neat, old-gold satin
furniture, puffed at its angles with peacock-colored plush.
The monumental folding doors between the long, narrow rooms are draped
with the same chaste combination of stuffs.
The dining-room blazes with a gold and purple wall paper, set off by
ebonized wood work and furniture. The conscientious contractor has
neglected no corner. Every square inch of the ceilings, walls, and
floors has been carved, embossed, stencilled, or gilded into a
bewildering monotony.
The husband, whose affairs are rapidly increasing on his hands, has no
time to attend to such insignificant details as house decoration, the
wife has perfect confidence in the taste of the firm employed. So at the
suggestion of the latter, and in order to complete the beauty of the
rooms, a Bouguereau, a Toulmouche and a couple of Schreyers are bought,
and a number of modern French bronzes scattered about on the multicolored
cabinets. Then, at last, the happy owners of all this splendor open
their doors to the admiration of their friends.
About the time the peacock plush and the gilding begin to show signs of
wear and tear, rumors of a fresh fashion in decoration float across from
England, and the new gospel of the beautiful according to Clarence Cook
is first preached to an astonished nation.
The fortune of our couple continuing to develop with pleasing rapidity,
the building of a country house is next decided upon. A friend of the
husband, who has recently started out as an architect, designs them a
picturesque residence without a straight line on its exterior or a square
room inside. This house is done up in strict obedience to the teachings
of the new sect. The dining-room is made about as cheerful as the
entrance to a family vault. The rest of the house bears a close
resemblance to an ecclesiastical junk shop. The entrance hall is filled
with what appears to be a communion table in solid oak, and the massive
chairs and settees of the parlor suggest the withdrawing room of Rowena,
aesthetic shades of momie-cloth drape deep-set windows, where anaemic and
disjointed females in stained glass pluck conventional roses.
To each of these successive transitions the husband has remained
obediently and tranquilly indifferent. He has in his heart considered
them all equally unfitting and uncomfortable and sighed in regretful
memory of a deep, old-fashioned arm-chair that sheltered his after-dinner
naps in the early rosewood period. So far he has been as clay in the
hands of his beloved wife, but the anaemic ladies and the communion table
are the last drop that causes his cup to overflow. He revolts and begins
to take matters into his own hands with the result that the household
enters its fifth incarnation under his guidance, during which everything
is painted white and all the wall-papers are a vivid scarlet. The family
sit on bogus Chippendale and eat off blue and white china.
With the building of their grand new house near the park the couple rise
together into the sixth cycle of their development. Having travelled and
studied the epochs by this time, they can tell a Louis XIV. from a Louis
XV. room, and recognize that mahogany and brass sphinxes denote furniture
of the Empire. This newly acquired knowledge is, however, vague and
hazy. They have no confidence in themselves, so give over the fitting of
their principal floors to the New York branch of a great French house.
Little is talked of now but periods, plans, and elevations. Under the
guidance of the French firm, they acquire at vast expense, faked
reproductions as historic furniture.
The spacious rooms are sticky with new gilding, and the flowered brocades
of the hangings and furniture crackle to the touch. The rooms were not
designed by the architect to receive any special kind of "treatment."
Immense folding-doors unite the salons, and windows open anywhere. The
decorations of the walls have been applied like a poultice, regardless of
the proportions of the rooms and the distribution of the spaces.
Building and decorating are, however, the best of educations. The
husband, freed at last from his business occupations, finds in this new
study an interest and a charm unknown to him before. He and his wife are
both vaguely disappointed when their resplendent mansion is finished,
having already outgrown it, and recognize that in spite of correct
detail, their costly apartments no more resemble the stately and simple
salons seen abroad than the cabin of a Fall River boat resembles the
_Galerie des Glaces_ at Versailles. The humiliating knowledge that they
are all wrong breaks upon them, as it is doing on hundreds of others, at
the same time as the desire to know more and appreciate better the
perfect productions of this art.
A seventh and last step is before them but they know not how to make it.
A surer guide than the upholsterer is, they know, essential, but their
library contains nothing to help them. Others possess the information
they need, yet they are ignorant where to turn for what they require.
With singular appropriateness a volume treating of this delightful "art"
has this season appeared at Scribner's. "The Decoration of Houses" is
the result of a woman's faultless taste collaborating with a man's
technical knowledge. Its mission is to reveal to the hundreds who have
advanced just far enough to find that they can go no farther alone,
truths lying concealed beneath the surface. It teaches that consummate
taste is satisfied only with a perfected simplicity; that the facades of
a house must be the envelope of the rooms within and adapted to them, as
the rooms are to the habits and requirements of them "that dwell
therein;" that proportion is the backbone of the decorator's art and that
supreme elegance is fitness and moderation; and, above all, that an
attention to architectural principles can alone lead decoration to a
perfect development.
No. 13--Our Elite and Public Life
The complaint is so often heard, and seems so well founded, that there is
a growing inclination, not only among men of social position, but also
among our best and cleverest citizens, to stand aloof from public life,
and this reluctance on their part is so unfortunate, that one feels
impelled to seek out the causes where they must lie, beneath the surface.
At a first glance they are not apparent. Why should not the honor of
representing one's town or locality be as eagerly sought after with us as
it is by English or French men of position? That such is not the case,
however, is evident.
Speaking of this the other evening, over my after-dinner coffee, with a
high-minded and public-spirited gentleman, who not long ago represented
our country at a European court, he advanced two theories which struck me
as being well worth repeating, and which seemed to account to a certain
extent for this curious abstinence.
As a first and most important cause, he placed the fact that neither our
national nor (here in New York) our state capital coincides with our
metropolis. In this we differ from England and all the continental
countries. The result is not difficult to perceive. In London, a man of
the world, a business man, or a great lawyer, who represents a locality
in Parliament, can fulfil his mandate and at the same time lead his usual
life among his own set. The lawyer or the business man can follow during
the day his profession, or those affairs on which he depends to support
his family and his position in the world. Then, after dinner (owing to
the peculiar hours adopted for the sittings of Parliament), he can take
his place as a law-maker. If he be a London-born man, he in no way
changes his way of life or that of his family. If, on the contrary, he
be a county magnate, the change he makes is all for the better, as it
takes him and his wife and daughters up to London, the haven of their
longings, and the centre of all sorts of social dissipations and
advancement.
With us, it is exactly the contrary. As the District of Columbia elects
no one, everybody living in Washington officially is more or less
expatriated, and the social life it offers is a poor substitute for the
circle which most families leave to go there.
That, however, is not the most important side of the question. Go to any
great lawyer of either New York or Chicago, and propose sending him to
Congress or the Senate. His answer is sure to be, "I cannot afford it. I
know it is an honor, but what is to replace the hundred thousand dollars
a year which my profession brings me in, not to mention that all my
practice would go to pieces during my absence?" Or again, "How should I
dare to propose to my family to leave one of the great centres of the
country to go and vegetate in a little provincial city like Washington?
No, indeed! Public life is out of the question for me!"
Does any one suppose England would have the class of men she gets in
Parliament, if that body sat at Bristol?
Until recently the man who occupied the position of Lord Chancellor made
thirty thousand pounds a year by his profession without interfering in
any way with his public duties, and at the present moment a recordership
in London in no wise prevents private practice. Were these gentlemen
Americans, they would be obliged to renounce all hope of professional
income in order to serve their country at its Capital.
Let us glance for a moment at the other reason. Owing to our laws
(doubtless perfectly reasonable, and which it is not my intention to
criticise,) a man must reside in the place he represents. Here again we
differ from all other constitutional countries. Unfortunately, our
clever young men leave the small towns of their birth and flock up to the
great centres as offering wider fields for their advancement. In
consequence, the local elector finds his choice limited to what is
left--the intellectual skimmed milk, of which the cream has been carried
to New York or other big cities. No country can exist without a
metropolis, and as such a centre by a natural law of assimilation absorbs
the best brains of the country, in other nations it has been found to the
interests of all parties to send down brilliant young men to the
"provinces," to be, in good time, returned by them to the national
assemblies.
As this is not a political article the simple indication of these two
causes will suffice, without entering into the question of their
reasonableness or of their justice. The social bearing of such a
condition is here the only side of the question under discussion; it is
difficult to over-rate the influence that a man's family exert over his
decisions.