the American husband is bitten with it, the wife submits to, rather than
abets, his inclinations. In most cases our women are not cosmopolitan
enough to enjoy being transplanted far away from their friends and
relations, even to fill positions of importance and honor. A New York
woman of great frankness and intelligence, who found herself recently in
a Western city under these circumstances, said, in answer to a flattering
remark that "the ladies of the place expected her to become their social
leader," "I don't see anything to lead," thus very plainly expressing her
opinion of the situation. It is hardly fair to expect a woman accustomed
to the life of New York or the foreign capitals, to look forward with
enthusiasm to a term of years passed in Albany, or in Washington.
In France very much the same state of affairs has been reached by quite a
different route. The aristocracy detest the present government, and it
is not considered "good form" by them to sit in the Chamber of Deputies
or to accept any but diplomatic positions. They condescend to fill the
latter because that entails living away from their own country, as they
feel more at ease in foreign courts than at the Republican receptions of
the Elysee.
There is a deplorable tendency among our self-styled aristocracy to look
upon their circle as a class apart. They separate themselves more each
year from the life of the country, and affect to smile at any of their
number who honestly wish to be of service to the nation. They, like the
French aristocracy, are perfectly willing, even anxious, to fill
agreeable diplomatic posts at first-class foreign capitals, and are
naively astonished when their offers of service are not accepted with
gratitude by the authorities in Washington. But let a husband propose to
his better half some humble position in the machinery of our government,
and see what the lady's answer will be.
The opinion prevails among a large class of our wealthy and cultivated
people, that to go into public life is to descend to duties beneath them.
They judge the men who occupy such positions with insulting severity,
classing them in their minds as corrupt and self-seeking, than which
nothing can be more childish or more imbecile. Any observer who has
lived in the different grades of society will quickly renounce the
puerile idea that sporting or intellectual pursuits are alone worthy of a
gentleman's attention. This very political life, which appears unworthy
of their attention to so many men, is, in reality, the great field where
the nations of the world fight out their differences, where the seed is
sown that will ripen later into vast crops of truth and justice. It is
(if rightly regarded and honestly followed) the battle-ground where man's
highest qualities are put to their noblest use--that of working for the
happiness of others.
No. 14--The Small Summer Hotel
We certainly are the most eccentric race on the surface of the globe and
ought to be a delight to the soul of an explorer, so full is our
civilization of contradictions, unexplained habits and curious customs.
It is quite unnecessary for the inquisitive gentlemen who pass their time
prying into other people's affairs and then returning home to write books
about their discoveries, to risk their lives and digestions in long
journeys into Central Africa or to the frozen zones, while so much good
material lies ready to their hands in our own land. The habits of the
"natives" in New England alone might occupy an active mind indefinitely,
offering as interesting problems as any to be solved by penetrating
Central Asia or visiting the man-eating tribes of Australia.
Perhaps one of our scientific celebrities, before undertaking his next
long voyage, will find time to make observations at home and collect
sufficient data to answer some questions that have long puzzled my
unscientific brain. He would be doing good work. Fame and honors await
the man who can explain why, for instance, sane Americans of the better
class, with money enough to choose their surroundings, should pass so
much of their time in hotels and boarding houses. There must be a reason
for the vogue of these retreats--every action has a cause, however
remote. I shall await with the deepest interest a paper on this subject
from one of our great explorers, untoward circumstances having some time
ago forced me to pass a few days in a popular establishment of this
class.
During my visit I amused myself by observing the inmates and trying to
discover why they had come there. So far as I could find out, the
greater part of them belonged to our well-to-do class, and when at home
doubtless lived in luxurious houses and were waited on by trained
servants. In the small summer hotel where I met them, they were living
in dreary little ten by twelve foot rooms, containing only the absolute
necessities of existence, a wash-stand, a bureau, two chairs and a bed.
And such a bed! One mattress about four inches thick over squeaking
slats, cotton sheets, so nicely calculated to the size of the bed that
the slightest move on the part of the sleeper would detach them from
their moorings and undo the housemaid's work; two limp, discouraged
pillows that had evidently been "banting," and a few towels a foot long
with a surface like sand-paper, completed the fittings of the room. Baths
were unknown, and hot water was a luxury distributed sparingly by a
capricious handmaiden. It is only fair to add that everything in the
room was perfectly clean, as was the coarse table linen in the dining
room.
The meals were in harmony with the rooms and furniture, consisting only
of the strict necessities, cooked with a Spartan disregard for such
sybarite foibles as seasoning or dressing. I believe there was a
substantial meal somewhere in the early morning hours, but I never
succeeded in getting down in time to inspect it. By successful bribery,
I induced one of the village belles, who served at table, to bring a cup
of coffee to my room. The first morning it appeared already poured out
in the cup, with sugar and cold milk added at her discretion. At one
o'clock a dinner was served, consisting of soup (occasionally), one meat
dish and attendant vegetables, a meagre dessert, and nothing else. At
half-past six there was an equally rudimentary meal, called "tea," after
which no further food was distributed to the inmates, who all, however,
seemed perfectly contented with this arrangement. In fact they
apparently looked on the act of eating as a disagreeable task, to be
hurried through as soon as possible that they might return to their
aimless rocking and chattering.
Instead of dinner hour being the feature of the day, uniting people
around an attractive table, and attended by conversation, and the meal
lasting long enough for one's food to be properly eaten, it was rushed
through as though we were all trying to catch a train. Then, when the
meal was over, the boarders relapsed into apathy again.
No one ever called this hospitable home a boarding-house, for the
proprietor was furious if it was given that name. He also scorned the
idea of keeping a hotel. So that I never quite understood in what
relation he stood toward us. He certainly considered himself our host,
and ignored the financial side of the question severely. In order not to
hurt his feelings by speaking to him of money, we were obliged to get our
bills by strategy from a male subordinate. Mine host and his family were
apparently unaware that there were people under their roof who paid them
for board and lodging. We were all looked upon as guests and
"entertained," and our rights impartially ignored.
Nothing, I find, is so distinctive of New England as this graceful
veiling of the practical side of life. The landlady always reminded me,
by her manner, of Barrie's description of the bill-sticker's wife who
"cut" her husband when she chanced to meet him "professionally" engaged.
As a result of this extreme detachment from things material, the house
ran itself, or was run by incompetent Irish and negro "help." There were
no bells in the rooms, which simplified the service, and nothing could be
ordered out of meal hours.
The material defects in board and lodging sink, however, into
insignificance before the moral and social unpleasantness of an
establishment such as this. All ages, all conditions, and all creeds are
promiscuously huddled together. It is impossible to choose whom one
shall know or whom avoid. A horrible burlesque of family life is
enabled, with all its inconveniences and none of its sanctity. People
from different cities, with different interests and standards, are
expected to "chum" together in an intimacy that begins with the eight
o'clock breakfast and ends only when all retire for the night. No
privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you take a book and begin to read
in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic
girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of
her affairs and the day's gossip. There is no escape unless you mount to
your ten-by-twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they
visit Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other
conveniences. Even such retirement is resented by the boarders. You are
thought to be haughty and to give yourself airs if you do not sit for
twelve consecutive hours each day in unending conversation with them.
When one reflects that thousands of our countrymen pass at least one-half
of their lives in these asylums, and that thousands more in America know
no other homes, but move from one hotel to another, while the same outlay
would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings, it does seem as if these
modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-ouins," were gradually returning to
prehistoric habits and would end by eating roots promiscuously in caves.
The contradiction appears more marked the longer one reflects on the love
of independence and impatience of all restraint that characterize our
race. If such an institution had been conceived by people of the Old
World, accustomed to moral slavery and to a thousand petty tyrannies, it
would not be so remarkable, but that we, of all the races of the earth,
should have created a form of torture unknown to Louis XI. or to the
Spanish Inquisitors, is indeed inexplicable! Outside of this happy land
the institution is unknown. The _pension_ when it exists abroad, is only
an exotic growth for an American market. Among European nations it is
undreamed of; the poorest when they travel take furnished rooms, where
they are served in private, or go to restaurants or _table d'hotes_ for
their meals. In a strictly continental hotel the public parlor does not
exist. People do not travel to make acquaintances, but for health or
recreation, or to improve their minds. The enforced intimacy of our
American family house, with its attendant quarrelling and back-biting, is
an infliction of which Europeans are in happy ignorance.
One explanation, only, occurs to me, which is that among New England
people, largely descended from Puritan stock, there still lingers some
blind impulse at self-mortification, an hereditary inclination to make
this life as disagreeable as possible by self-immolation. Their
ancestors, we are told by Macaulay, suppressed bull baiting, not because
it hurt the bull, but because it gave pleasure to the people. Here in
New England they refused the Roman dogma of Purgatory and then with
complete inconsistency, invented the boarding-house, in order, doubtless,
to take as much of the joy as possible out of this life, as a preparation
for endless bliss in the next.
No. 15--A False Start
Having had, during a wandering existence, many opportunities of observing
my compatriots away from home and familiar surroundings in various
circles of cosmopolitan society, at foreign courts, in diplomatic life,
or unofficial capacities, I am forced to acknowledge that whereas my
countrywoman invariably assumed her new position with grace and dignity,
my countryman, in the majority of cases, appeared at a disadvantage.
I take particular pleasure in making this tribute to my "sisters" tact
and wit, as I have been accused of being "hard" on American women, and
some half-humorous criticisms have been taken seriously by
over-susceptible women--doubtless troubled with guilty consciences for
nothing is more exact than the old French proverb, "It is only the truth
that wounds."
The fact remains clear, however, that American men, as regards polish,
facility in expressing themselves in foreign languages, the arts of
pleasing and entertaining, in short, the thousand and one nothings
composing that agreeable whole, a cultivated member of society, are
inferior to their womankind. I feel sure that all Americans who have
travelled and have seen their compatriot in his social relations with
foreigners, will agree with this, reluctant as I am to acknowledge it.
That a sister and brother brought up together, under the same influences,
should later differ to this extent seems incredible. It is just this
that convinces me we have made a false start as regards the education and
ambitions of our young men.
To find the reasons one has only to glance back at our past. After the
struggle that insured our existence as a united nation, came a period of
great prosperity. When both seemed secure, we did not pause and take
breath, as it were, before entering a new epoch of development, but
dashed ahead on the old lines. It is here that we got on the wrong road.
Naturally enough too, for our peculiar position on this continent, far
away from the centres of cultivation and art, surrounded only by less
successful states with which to compare ourselves, has led us into
forming erroneous ideas as to the proportions of things, causing us to
exaggerate the value of material prosperity and undervalue matters of
infinitely greater importance, which have been neglected in consequence.
A man who, after fighting through our late war, had succeeded in amassing
a fortune, naturally wished his son to follow him on the only road in
which it had ever occurred to him that success was of any importance. So
beyond giving the boy a college education, which he had not enjoyed, his
ambition rarely went; his idea being to make a practical business man of
him, or a lawyer, that he could keep the estate together more
intelligently. In thousands of cases, of course, individual taste and
bent over-ruled this influence, and a career of science or art was
chosen; but in the mass of the American people, it was firmly implanted
that the pursuit of wealth was the only occupation to which a reasonable
human being could devote himself. A young man who was not in some way
engaged in increasing his income was looked upon as a very undesirable
member of society, and sure, sooner or later, to come to harm.
Millionaires declined to send their sons to college, saying they would
get ideas there that would unfit them for business, to Paterfamilias the
one object of life. Under such fostering influences, the ambitions in
our country have gradually given way to money standards and the false
start has been made! Leaving aside at once the question of money in its
relation to our politics (although it would be a fruitful subject for
moralizing), and confining ourselves strictly to the social side of life,
we soon see the results of this mammon worship.
In England (although Englishmen have been contemptuously called the shop-
keepers of the world) the extension and maintenance of their vast empire
is the mainspring which keeps the great machine in movement. And one
sees tens of thousands of well-born and delicately-bred men cheerfully
entering the many branches of public service where the hope of wealth can
never come, and retiring on pensions or half-pay in the strength of their
middle age, apparently without a regret or a thought beyond their
country's well-being.
In France, where the passionate love of their own land has made colonial
extension impossible, the modern Frenchman of education is more
interested in the yearly exhibition at the _Salon_ or in a successful
play at the _Francais_, than in the stock markets of the world.
Would that our young men had either of these bents! They have copied
from England a certain love of sport, without the English climate or the
calm of country and garrison life, to make these sports logical and
necessary. As the young American millionaire thinks he must go on
increasing his fortune, we see the anomaly of a man working through a
summer's day in Wall Street, then dashing in a train to some suburban
club, and appearing a half-hour later on the polo field. Next to wealth,
sport has become the ambition of the wealthy classes, and has grown so
into our college life that the number of students in the freshman class
of our great universities is seriously influenced by that institution's
losses or gains at football.
What is the result of all this? A young man starts in life with the firm
intention of making a great deal of money. If he has any time left from
that occupation he will devote it to sport. Later in life, when he has
leisure and travels, or is otherwise thrown with cultivated strangers, he
must naturally be at a disadvantage. "Shop," he cannot talk; he knows
that is vulgar. Music, art, the drama, and literature are closed books
to him, in spite of the fact that he may have a box on the grand tier at
the opera and a couple of dozen high-priced "masterpieces" hanging around
his drawing-rooms. If he is of a finer clay than the general run of his
class, he will realize dimly that somehow the goal has been missed in his
life race. His chase after the material has left him so little time to
cultivate the ideal, that he has prepared himself a sad and aimless old
age; unless he can find pleasure in doing as did a man I have been told
about, who, receiving half a dozen millions from his father's estate,
conceived the noble idea of increasing them so that he might leave to
each of his four children as much as he had himself received. With the
strictest economy, and by suppressing out of his life and that of his
children all amusements and superfluous outlay, he has succeeded now for
many years in living on the income of his income. Time will never hang
heavy on this Harpagon's hands. He is a perfectly happy individual, but
his conversation is hardly of a kind to attract, and it may be doubted if
the rest of the family are as much to be envied.
An artist who had lived many years of his life in Paris and London was
speaking the other day of a curious phase he had remarked in our American
life. He had been accustomed over there to have his studio the meeting-
place of friends, who would drop in to smoke and lounge away an hour,
chatting as he worked. To his astonishment, he tells me that since he
has been in New York not one of the many men he knows has ever passed an
hour in his rooms. Is not that a significant fact? Another remark which
points its own moral was repeated to me recently. A foreigner visiting
here, to whom American friends were showing the sights of our city,
exclaimed at last: "You have not pointed out to me any celebrities except
millionaires. 'Do you see that man? he is worth ten millions. Look at
that house! it cost one million dollars, and there are pictures in it
worth over three million dollars. That trotter cost one hundred thousand
dollars,' etc." Was he not right? And does it not give my reader a
shudder to see in black and white the phrases that are, nevertheless, so
often on our lips?
This levelling of everything to its cash value is so ingrained in us that
we are unconscious of it, as we are of using slang or local expressions
until our attention is called to them. I was present once at a farce
played in a London theatre, where the audience went into roars of
laughter every time the stage American said, "Why, certainly." I was
indignant, and began explaining to my English friend that we never used
such an absurd phrase. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Why, certainly," I
said, and stopped, catching the twinkle in his eye.
It is very much the same thing with money. We do not notice how often it
slips into the conversation. "Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth
speaketh." Talk to an American of a painter and the charm of his work.
He will be sure to ask, "Do his pictures sell well?" and will lose all
interest if you say he can't sell them at all. As if that had anything
to do with it!
Remembering the well-known anecdote of Schopenhauer and the gold piece
which he used to put beside his plate at the _table d'hote_, where he
ate, surrounded by the young officers of the German army, and which was
to be given to the poor the first time he heard any conversation that was
not about promotion or women, I have been tempted to try the experiment
in our clubs, changing the subjects to stocks and sport, and feel
confident that my contributions to charity would not ruin me.
All this has had the result of making our men dull companions; after
dinner, or at a country house, if the subject they love is tabooed, they
talk of nothing! It is sad for a rich man (unless his mind has remained
entirely between the leaves of his ledger) to realize that money really
buys very little, and above a certain amount can give no satisfaction in
proportion to its bulk, beyond that delight which comes from a sense of
possession. Croesus often discovers as he grows old that he has
neglected to provide himself with the only thing that "is a joy for
ever"--a cultivated intellect--in order to amass a fortune that turns to
ashes, when he has time to ask of it any of the pleasures and resources
he fondly imagined it would afford him. Like Talleyrand's young man who
would not learn whist, he finds that he has prepared for himself a
dreadful old age!
No. 16--A Holy Land
Not long ago an article came under my notice descriptive of the
neighborhood around Grant's tomb and the calm that midsummer brings to
that vicinity, laughingly referred to as the "Holy Land."
As careless fingers wandering over the strings of a violin may
unintentionally strike a chord, so the writer of those lines, all
unconsciously, with a jest, set vibrating a world of tender memories and
associations; for the region spoken of is truly a holy land to me, the
playground of my youth, and connected with the sweetest ties that can
bind one's thoughts to the past.
Ernest Renan in his _Souvenirs d'Enfance_, tells of a Brittany legend,
firmly believed in that wild land, of the vanished city of "Is," which
ages ago disappeared beneath the waves. The peasants still point out at
a certain place on the coast the site of the fabled city, and the
fishermen tell how during great storms they have caught glimpses of its
belfries and ramparts far down between the waves; and assert that on calm
summer nights they can hear the bells chiming up from those depths. I
also have a vanished "Is" in my heart, and as I grow older, I love to
listen to the murmurs that float up from the past. They seem to come
from an infinite distance, almost like echoes from another life.
At that enchanted time we lived during the summers in an old wooden house
my father had re-arranged into a fairly comfortable dwelling. A
tradition, which no one had ever taken the trouble to verify, averred
that Washington had once lived there, which made that hero very real to
us. The picturesque old house stood high on a slope where the land rises
boldly; with an admirable view of distant mountain, river and opposing
Palisades.