I
I am too good a Philadelphian to begin to talk about the Assembly in the
middle of a chapter. It holds a place apart in the social life of
Philadelphia of which annually it is the supreme moment, and in my
record of my experiences of this life, however imperfect, I can treat it
with no less consideration. It must have a chapter apart.
To go to the Assembly was the one thing of all others I wanted to do,
not only on the general principle that the thing one wants most is the
thing one cannot have, but because to go to the Assembly was the thing
of all others I ought to have done. There could be no question of that.
You were not really out in Philadelphia if you did not go; only the
Friends could afford not to. And Americans from other towns felt much
the same way about it, they felt they were not anybody if they were not
invited, and they moved heaven and earth for an invitation, and prized
it, when received, as highly as a pedigree. A few honoured guests were
always at the Assembly.
[Illustration: THE HALL, STENTON]
Philadelphians who are not on the Assembly list may pretend to laugh at
it, to despise it, to sneer at the snobbishness of people who endeavour
to draw a social line in a country where everybody is as good as
everybody else and where those on the right side may look down but those
on the wrong will not be induced to look up. And not one among those who
laugh and sneer would not jump at the chance to get in, were it given
them, at the risk of being transformed into snobs themselves. For the
Assembly places the Philadelphian as nothing else can. It gives him what
the German gets from his quarterings or the Briton from an invitation to
Court. The Dancing Class had its high social standard, it required
grandfathers as credentials before admission could be granted, the
archives of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania supplied no more
authoritative assurance of Philadelphia respectability than its
subscription list, but the Dancing Class was lax in its standard
compared to the Assembly. I am not sure what was the number, what the
quality, of ancestors the Assembly exacted, but I know that it was as
inexorable in its exactions as the Council of Ten. It would have been
easier for troops of camels to pass through the eye of a needle than for
one Philadelphian north of Market Street to get through the Assembly
door. I am told that matters are worse to-day when Philadelphia society
has increased in numbers until new limits must be set to the Assembly
lest it perish of its own unwieldiness. The applicants must produce not
only forefathers but fathers and mothers on the list, and the
Philadelphian whose name was there more than a century and a half ago
cannot make good his rights if his parents neglected to establish
theirs. And to be refused is not merely humiliation, but humiliation
with Philadelphia for witness, and the misery and shame that are the
burden of the humiliated.
It is foolish, I admit, society is too light a matter to suffer for; it
is cruel, for the social wound goes deep. But were it ten times more
foolish, ten times more cruel, I would not have it otherwise.
Philadelphians preserve their State House, their Colonial mansions and
churches; why should they not be as careful of their Assembly, since it
has as historic a background and as fine Colonial and Revolutionary
traditions? They are proud of having their names among those who signed
the Declaration of Independence; why should they not take equal--or
greater--pride in figuring among the McCalls and Willings and Shippens
and Sims and any number of others on the first Assembly lists, since
these are earlier in date? Besides, to such an extremity have the
changes of the last quarter of a century driven the Philadelphian that
he must make a good fight for survival in his own town. When I think of
how mere wealth is taking possession of "Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce and
Pine," how uptown is marrying into it, how the Jew and the alien are
forcing their way in, I see in loyalty to the traditions of the Assembly
of Philadelphian's strongest defence of the social rights which are his
by inheritance. Should he let go, what would there be for him to catch
on to again?
[Illustration: "PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT ALL THE LAND UNTO ALL THE
INHABITANTS THEREOF"]
It would be different if what Philadelphia was getting in exchange were
finer, or as fine. But it is not. The old exclusiveness, with its
follies, was better, more amusing, than the new tendency to do away with
everything that gave Philadelphia society its character. It was the
charm and the strength of Philadelphia society that it had a character
of its own and was not just like Boston or New York or Baltimore
society. Nobody, however remote was their mission from social matters,
could visit Philadelphia without being impressed by this difference,
whether it was to discover, with John Adams, that Philadelphians had
their particular way of being a happy, elegant, tranquil, polite people,
or, with so unlikely an observer as Matthew Arnold, that "the leading
families in Philadelphia were much thought of," and that Philadelphia
names saying nothing to an Englishman said everything to every American.
Who you were counted in Philadelphia, as what you knew in Boston, or
what you were worth in New York, and there was not an American of old
who did not accept the fact and respect it. Philadelphia society clung
to the Philadelphia surface of tranquillity, of untroubled repose
whatever might be going on beneath it, and in my time I would not like
to say how disturbing and agitating were the scandals and intrigues that
were said to be going on. They were rarely made public. It was not in
Philadelphia as in London where next to everybody you meet has been or
is about to be divorced, though it might be that next to everybody you
met was not making it a practice to keep to the straight and narrow
path, to be as innocent as everybody looked. Logan Square could have
told tales, if the Divorce Court could not.
[Illustration: BED ROOM, STENTON, THE HOME OF JAMES LOGAN]
But now Philadelphia has strayed from its characteristic exclusiveness;
gone far to get rid of even the air of tranquillity. With the modern
"Peggy Shippen" and "Sally Wister" alert to give away its affairs in the
columns of the daily paper, it could not keep its secrets to itself if
it wanted to. And it does not seem to want to--that is the saddest part
of the whole sad transformation. It rather likes the world outside to
know what it is doing and, worse, it takes that world as its model. Its
aim apparently is to show that it can be as like every other town as two
peas, so that, drinking tea to music at the Bellevue, dancing at the
Ritz, lunching and dining and playing golf and polo at the Country
Clubs, the visitor can comfortably forget he is not at home but in
Philadelphia. The youth of Philadelphia have become eager to desert the
Episcopal Academy and the University for Groton or St. Paul's, Harvard
or Yale, in order that they may be trained to be not Philadelphians but,
as they imagine, men of the world, forgetting the distinction there has
hitherto been in being plain Philadelphians. At the moment when in far
older towns of Europe people are striving to recover their character by
reviving local costumes, language, and customs, Philadelphians are
deliberately throwing theirs away with their old traditions. The
Assembly is one of their few rare possessions left, and strict as they
are with it in one way, in another they are playing fast and loose with
it, holding it, as if it were a mere modern dance, at a fashionable
hotel.
II
If I now regret, as I do, never having gone to the Assembly, it is
because of all that it represents, all that makes it a classic. But at
the time, my regret, though as keen, was because of more personal
reasons. I could have borne the historic side of my loss with
equanimity, it was the social side of it that broke my heart. I have had
many bad quarters of an hour in my life, but few as poignant as that
which followed the appearance at our front door of the coloured man who
distributed the cards for the Assembly--far too precious to be trusted
to the post--and who came to leave one for my Brother. It was an
injustice that oppressed me with a sense of my wrongs as a woman and
might have set me window-smashing had window-smashing as a protest been
invented. Why should the Assembly be so much easier for men? My Brother
had but to put on the dress suit he had worn it did not matter how many
years, and as he was, like every other American young man, at work and
an independent person altogether--a millionaire I saw in him--the price
of the card in an annual subscription was his affair and nobody else's.
But, in my case the price was not my affair. I had not a cent to call my
own, I was not at work, I was denied the right to work, and, the
Assembly coming fairly late in the season, my white tarlatan and Second
Street silk showed wear and tear that unfitted them for the most
important social function of the winter. Philadelphia women dressed
simply, it is true; that used to be one of the ways the Quaker influence
showed itself; they boasted then that their restraint in dress
distinguished them from other American women. But simplicity does not
mean cheapness or indifference. The Friends took infinite pains with
their soft brown and silvery grey silks, with their delicate fichus and
Canton shawls. The well-dressed Philadelphia woman knows what she has to
pay for the elegance of her simplicity. And the Assembly has always
called for the finest she could achieve, from the day when Franklin was
made to feel the cost to him if his daughter was to have what she needed
to go out "in decency" with the Washingtons in Philadelphia.
[Illustration: THE TUNNEL IN THE PARK]
I had the common sense to understand my position and not to be misled by
the poverty-stricken, but irresistible Nancies and Dollies who were
enjoying a vogue in the novels of the day and who encircled empty bank
accounts and big families with the halo of romance. To read about the
struggles with poverty of the irresistible young heroine might be
amusing, but I had no special use for them as a personal experience. It
would have been preposterous for me to think for a moment that, without
a decent gown, I could go to the Assembly and, to do myself justice, I
did not think it. But by this time I knew what coming out and being out
meant and, therefore, I appreciated the social drawback it must be for
me not to be able to go. It explained, as nothing hitherto had, how far
I was from being caught up in the whirl, and it is only the whirl that
keeps one going in society--that makes society a delightful profession,
and I think I realized this truth better than the people so
extravagantly in the Philadelphia whirl as to have no time to think
about it. All that winter I never got to the point of being less
concerned as to where the next invitation was to come from than as to
how I was to accept all that did come. There is no use denying that I
was disappointed and suffered from the disappointment. One pays a
heavier price for the first foolish illusion lost than for all the
others put together, no matter how serious they are.
III
When the season was over, I had as little hope of keeping up in other
essential ways. If society then adjourned from Philadelphia because the
heat made it impossible to stay at home, it was only to start a new
Philadelphia on the porch of Howland's Hotel at Long Branch or, as it
was just then beginning to do, at Bar Harbor and in the camps of the
Adirondacks, or, above all, at Narragansett. "It may be accepted as an
incontrovertible truth," Janvier says in one of his Philadelphia
stories, "that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to
the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in
the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that
damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very
probably would lead to a rejection of the entire Copernican system." If
Philadelphians went abroad, which was much more exceptional then than
now, it was to meet each other. I know hotels in London to-day where, if
you go in the afternoon, it is just like an afternoon reception in
Philadelphia, and hotels in Paris where at certain seasons you find
nobody but Philadelphians talking Philadelphia, though the Philadelphian
has not disappeared who does not want to travel because he finds
Philadelphia good enough for him. And it has always been like that.
But I could not follow Philadelphia society in the summer time any more
than I could go with it to the Assembly in the winter. I had reason to
consider myself fortunate if I travelled as far as Mount Airy or
Chestnut Hill out of the red brick oven Philadelphia used to be--is now
and ever shall be!--from June to September. It was an event if I got off
with the crowd--the linen-dustered, wilting-collared crowds; surely we
are not so demoralized by the heat nowadays?--to Cape May or Atlantic
City, to enjoy the land breeze blowing, from over the Jersey swamps,
clouds of mosquitoes before it so that nobody could stir out of doors
without gloves and a veil. These, however, were not the summer joys
society demanded of me. The further I went into the social game, the
less I got from it, and I had decided that for the poor it was not
worth the candle at the end of the first year, or was it the second?
That I should be uncertain shows how little my heart was in the business
of going out.
[Illustration: THE BOAT HOUSES ON THE SCHUYLKILL]
I did not necessarily give up every amusement because I did not go out.
In fact, I cannot recall a dance that amused me as much as many a
boating party on the Schuylkill in the gold of the June afternoon, or
many a walking party through the Park in the starlit summer night. There
also remained, had I chosen, the staid entertainment of the women who,
for one reason or other, had retired from the gayer round, and whose
amusements consisted of more intimate receptions, teas, without number,
sewing societies. And it was the period when Philadelphia was waking up
to the charms of the higher education for women,--to the dissipations of
"culture." I had friends who filled their time by studying for the
examinations Harvard had at last condescended to allow them to pass, or
try to pass; others found their sober recreation by qualifying
themselves as teachers and teaching in a large society formed to impart
learning by correspondence: all these women keeping their occupation to
themselves as much as possible, not wishing to make a public scandal in
Philadelphia which had not accustomed itself to the spectacle of women
working unless compelled to;--all this quite outside of the University
set, which must have existed, if I did not know it, as the Bryn Mawr set
exists to-day, but which, as far as my experience went, was then never
heard of except by the fortunate and privileged few who belonged to it.
But this new amusement required effort, and experience had not made me
in love with the amusement that had to be striven for, that had to be
paid for by exertion of any kind. There was an interval when
Philadelphia would have been searched in vain for another idler as
confirmed as I. Having found nothing to do, I proceeded to do it with
all my might. I stood in no need of the poet's command to lean and loaf
at my ease, though I am afraid I leaned and loafed so well as to neglect
the other half of his precept and to forget to invite my soul. To those
years I now look back as to so much good time lost in a working life all
too short at the best.