women who strike out for themselves in a new country, who cut out their
homes in primeval forests, and who make their peace with the native
barbarians. The Pilgrim Fathers and the early settlers in Australia
and South Africa and amidst the snows of Canada were colonists of
whom any mother-nation might be proud; but the emigrants who shrink
at the crudeness of our present American civilization, who shirk the
responsibilities of our government, who must have a leisure class with
which to play, and who are shocked by the familiarity of our press,
are colonists who leave their country for their country's good. The
American Colony in Paris is in a strange position. Its members are
neither the one thing nor the other. They cannot stand in the shadow of
the Arc de Triomphe and feel that any part of its glory falls on them,
nor can they pretend an interest in the defeat of Tammany Hall, nor
claim any portion in the magnificent triumph of the Chicago Fair. Their
attitude must always be one of explanation; they are continually on the
defensive; they apologize to the American visitor and to the native
Frenchman; they have declined their birthright and are voluntary exiles
from their home. The only way by which they can justify their action
is either to belittle what they have given up, or to emphasize the
benefits which they have received in exchange, and these benefits are
hardly perceptible. They remain what they are, and no matter how long
it may have been since they ceased to be Americans, they do not become
Frenchmen. They are a race all to themselves; they are the American
Colony.
On regular occasions this Colony asserts itself, but only on those
occasions when there is a chance of its advertising itself at the
expense of the country it has renounced. When this chance comes the
Colonists suddenly remember their former home; they rush into print,
or they make speeches in public places, or buy wreaths for some dead
celebrity. Or when it so happens that no one of prominence has died for
some time, and there seems to be no other way of getting themselves
noticed, the American Colony rises in its strength and remembers
Lafayette, and decorates his grave. Once every month or so they march
out into the country and lay a wreath on his tomb, and so for the
moment gain a certain vogue with the Parisians, which is all that
they ask. They do not perform this ceremony because Lafayette fought
in America, but because he was a Frenchman fighting in America, and
they are playing now to the French galleries and not to the American
bleaching-boards. There are a few descendants of Lafayette who are
deserving of our sincere sympathy. For these gentlemen are brought into
the suburbs many times a year in the rain and storm to watch different
American Colonists place a wreath on the tomb of their distinguished
ancestor, and make speeches about a man who left his country only to
fight for the independence of another country, and not to live in
it after it was free. Some day the descendants of Lafayette and the
secretaries of the American embassy will rise up and rebel, and refuse
to lend themselves longer to the uses of these gentlemen.
They will suggest that there are other graves in Paris. There is, for
instance, the grave of Paul Jones, who possibly did as much for America
on the sea as Lafayette did on shore. If he had only been a Frenchman,
with a few descendants of title still living who would consent to act
as chief mourners on occasion, his spirit might hope to be occasionally
remembered with a wreath or two; but as it is, he is not to be
considered with the French marquis, who must, we can well imagine,
turn uneasily beneath the wreaths these self-advertising patriots lay
upon his grave.
The American Colony is not wicked, but it would like to be thought
so, which is much worse. Among some of the men it is a pose to be
considered the friend of this or that particular married woman, and
each of them, instead of paying the woman the slight tribute of
treating her in public as though they were the merest acquaintances,
which is the least the man can do, rather forces himself upon her
horizon, and is always in evidence, not obnoxiously, but unobtrusively,
like a pet cat or a butler, but still with sufficient pertinacity to
let you know that he is there.
As a matter of fact the women have not the courage to carry out to the
end these affairs of which they hint, as have the French men and women
around them whose example they are trying to emulate. And, moreover,
the twenty-five years of virtue which they have spent in America, as
Balzac has pointed out, is not to be overcome in a day or in many
days, and so they only pretend to have overcome it, and tell _risqués_
stories and talk scandalously of each other and even of young girls.
But it all begins and ends in talk, and the _risqués_ stories, if they
knew it, sound rather silly from their lips, especially to men who put
them away when they were boys at boarding-school, and when they were so
young that they thought it was grand to be vulgar and manly to be nasty.
It is a question whether or not one should be pleased that the would-be
wicked American woman in Paris cannot adopt the point of view of the
Parisian women as easily as she adopts their bonnets. She tries to do
so, it is true; she tries to look on life from the same side, but she
does not succeed very well, and you may be sure she is afraid and a
fraud at heart, and in private a most excellent wife and mother. If it
be reprehensible to be a hypocrite and to pretend to be better than one
is, it should also be wrong to pretend to be worse than one dares to
be, and so lend countenance to others. It is like a man who shouts with
the mob, but whose sympathies are against it. The mob only hears him
shout and takes courage at his doing so, and continues in consequence
to destroy things. And these foolish, pretty women lend countenance
by their talk and by their stories to many things of which they know
nothing from experience, and so do themselves injustice and others
much harm. Sometimes it happens that an outsider brings them up with a
sharp turn, and shows them how far they have strayed from the standard
which they recognized at home. I remember, as an instance of this, how
an American art student told me with much satisfaction last summer of
how he had made himself intensely disagreeable at a dinner given by
one of these expatriated Americans. "I didn't mind their taking away
the character of every married woman they knew," he said; "they were
their own friends, not mine; but I did object when they began on the
young girls, for that is something we haven't learned at home yet. And
finally they got to Miss ----, and one of the women said, 'Oh, she has
so compromised herself now that no one will marry her.'"
At which, it seems, my young man banged the table with his fist, and
said: "I'll marry her, if she'll have me, and I know twenty more men
at home who would be glad of the chance. We've all asked her once, and
we're willing to ask her again."
[Illustration: "THE AMERICAN COLONY IS NOT WICKED"]
There was an uncomfortable pause, and the young woman who had spoken
protested she had not meant it so seriously. She had only meant the
girl was a trifle _passée_ and travel-worn. But when the women had left
the table, one of the men laughed, and said:
"You are quite like a breeze from the piny woods at home. I suppose we
do talk rather thoughtlessly over here, but then none of us take what
we say of each other as absolute truth."
The other men all agreed to this, and protested that no one took them
or what they said seriously. They were quite right, and, as a matter
of fact, it would be unjust to them to do so, except to pity them. The
Man without a Country was no more unfortunate than they. It is true
they have Henry's bar, where they can get real American cocktails, and
the Travellers', where they can play real American poker; but that is
as near as they ever get to anything that savors of our country, and
they do not get as near as that towards anything that savors of the
Frenchman's country. They have their own social successes, and their
own salons and dinner-parties, but the Faubourg St.-Germain is as
strange a territory to many of them as though it were situated in the
heart of the Congo Basin.
Of course there are many fine, charming, whole-souled, and clean-minded
American women in Paris. They are the wives of bankers or merchants or
the representatives of the firms which have their branches in Paris and
London as well as New York. And there are hundreds more of Americans
who are in Paris because of its art, the cheapness of its living, and
its beauty. I am not speaking of them, and should they read this they
will understand.
The American in Paris of whom one longest hesitates to speak is
the girl or woman who has married a title. She has been so much
misrepresented in the press, and so misunderstood, and she suffers in
some cases so acutely without letting it be known how much she suffers,
that the kindest word that could be said of her is not half so kind as
silence. No one can tell her more distinctly than she herself knows
what her lot is, or how few of her illusions have been realized. It is
not a case where one can point out grandiloquently that uneasy lies
the head that wears a coronet; it is not magnificent sorrow; it is
just pathetic, sordid, and occasionally ridiculous. To treat it too
seriously would be as absurd as to weep over a man who had allowed
himself to be fooled by a thimblerigger; only in this case it is a
woman who has been imposed upon, and who asks for your sympathy.
There is a very excellent comic song which points out how certain
things are only English when you see them on Broadway; and a title, or
the satisfaction of being a countess or princess, when viewed from a
Broadway or Fifth Avenue point of view, is a very pretty and desirable
object. But as the title has to be worn in Paris and not in New York,
its importance lies in the way in which it is considered there, not
here. As far as appears on the surface, the American woman of title
in Paris fails to win what she sought, from either her own people or
those among whom she has married. To her friends from New York or San
Francisco she is still Sallie This or Eleanor That. Her friends are not
deceived or impressed or overcome--at least, not in Paris. When they
return to New York they speak casually of how they have been spending
the summer with the Princess So-and-So, and they do not add that she
used to be Sallie Sprigs of San Francisco. But in Paris, when they
are with her, they call her Sallie, just as of yore, and they let her
understand that they do not consider her in any way changed since she
has become ennobled, or that the glamour of her rank in any way dazzles
them. And she in her turn is so anxious that they shall have nothing to
say of her to her disadvantage when they return that she shows them
little of her altered state, and is careful not to refer to any of the
interesting names on her new visiting-list.
Her husband's relations in France are more disappointing: they
certainly cannot be expected to see her in any different light from
that of an outsider and a nobody; they will not even admit that she
is pretty; and they say among themselves that, so long as Cousin
Charles had to marry a great fortune, it is a pity he did not marry a
French woman, and that they always had preferred the daughter of the
chocolate-maker, or the champagne-grower, or the Hebrew banker--all of
whom were offered to him. The American princess cannot expect people
who have had title and ancestors so long as to have forgotten them
to look upon Sallie Sprigs of California as anything better than an
Indian squaw. And the result is, that all which the American woman
makes by her marriage is the privilege of putting her coronet on her
handkerchief and the humble deference of the women at Paquin's or
Virot's, who say "Madame the Baroness" and "Madame the Princess" at
every second word. It really seems a very heavy price to pay for very
little.
We are attributing very trivial and vulgar motives to the woman, and
it may be, after all, that she married for love in spite of the title,
and not on account of it. But if these are love-matches, it would
surely sometimes happen that the American men, in their turn, would
fall in love with foreign women of title, and that we would hear of
impecunious princesses and countesses hunting through the States for
rich brokers and wheat-dealers. Of course the obvious answer to this
is that the American women are so much more attractive than the men
that they appeal to people of all nations and of every rank, and that
American men are content to take them without the title.
The rich fathers of the young girls who are sacrificed should go into
the business with a more accurate knowledge of what they are buying.
Even the shrewdest of them--men who could not be misled into buying a
worthless railroad or an empty mine--are frequently imposed upon in
these speculations. The reason is that while they have made a study of
the relative values and the soundness of railroads and mines, they have
not taken the pains to study this question of titles, and as long as a
man is a count or a prince, they inquire no further, and one of them
buys him for his daughter on his face value. There should be a sort
of Bradstreet for these rich parents, which they could consult before
investing so much money plus a young girl's happiness. There are, as a
matter of fact, only a very few titles worth buying, and in selecting
the choice should always lie between one of England and one of Germany.
An English earl is the best the American heiress can reasonably hope
for, and after him a husband with a German title is very desirable.
These might be rated as "sure" and "safe" investments.
But these French titles created by Napoleon, or the Italians, with
titles created by the Papal Court, and the small fry of other
countries, are really not worth while. Theirs are not titles; as some
one has said, they are epitaphs; and the best thing to do with the
young American girl who thinks she would like to be a princess is
to take her abroad early in her life, and let her meet a few other
American girls who have become princesses. After that, if she still
wants to buy a prince and pay his debts and supply him with the credit
to run into more debt, she has only herself to blame, and goes into it
with her pretty eyes wide open. It will be then only too evident that
she is fitted for nothing higher.
[Illustration: "WHAT MIGHT SOME TIME HAPPEN IF THESE WERE LOVE-MATCHES"]
On no one class of visitor does Paris lay her spell more heavily than
on the American art student. For, no matter where he has studied at
home, or under what master, he finds when he reaches Paris so much
that is new and beautiful and full of inspiration that he becomes as
intolerant as are all recent converts, and so happy in his chosen
profession that he looks upon everything else than art with impatience
and contempt. As art is something about which there are many opinions,
he too often passes rapidly on to the stage when he can see nothing to
admire in any work save that which the master that he worships declares
to be true, and he scorns every other form of expression and every
other school and every other artist.
You almost envy the young man his certainty of mind and the
unquestionableness of his opinion. He will take you through the Salon
at a quick step, demolishing whole walls of pictures as he goes with
a sweeping gesture of the hand, and will finally bring you breathless
before a little picture, or a group of them, which, so he informs you,
are the only ones in the exhibition worthy of consideration. And on
the day following a young disciple of another school will escort you
through the same rooms, and regard with pitying contempt the pictures
which your friend of the day before has left standing, and will pick
out somewhere near the roof a strange monstrosity, beneath which he
will stand with bowed head, and upon which he will comment in a whisper.
It is an amusing pose, and most bewildering to a philistine like
myself when he finds all the artists whom he had venerated denounced
as photographers and decorators, or story-tellers and illustrators. I
used to be quite ashamed of the ignorance which had left me so long
unenlightened as to what was true and beautiful.
These boys have, perhaps, an aunt in Kansas City, or a mother in Lynn,
Massachusetts, who is saving and pinching to send them fifteen or
twenty dollars a week so that they can learn to be great painters,
and they have not been in Paris a week before they have changed their
entire view of art, and adopted a new method and a new master and a
new religion. It is nowise derogatory to a boy to be supported by a
fond aunt in Kansas City, who sends him fifteen dollars a week and the
news of the social life of that place, but it is amusing to think how
she and his cousins in the West would be awed if they heard him damn a
picture by waving his thumb in the air at it, and saying, "It has a
little too much of that," with a downward sweep of the thumb, "and not
enough of this," with an upward sweep. For one hardly expects a youth
who is still at Julien's, and who has not yet paid the first quarter's
rent for his studio, to proclaim all the first painters of France as
only fit to color photographs. It is as if some one were to say, "You
can take away all of the books of the Boston Library and nothing will
be lost, but spare three volumes of sonnets written by the only great
writer of the present time, who is a friend of mine, and of whom no one
knows but myself."
Of course one must admire loyalty of that sort, for when it is loyalty
to an idea it cannot help but be fine and sometimes noble, though it is
a trifle amusing as well. It is just this tenacity of belief in one's
own work, and just this intolerance of the work of others, that make
Paris inspiring. A man cannot help but be in earnest, if he amounts
to anything at all, when on every side he hears his work attacked or
vaunted to the skies. As long as the question asked is "Is it art?" and
not "Will it sell?" and "Is it popular?" the influence must be for good.
These students, in their loyalty to the particular school they admire,
of course proclaim their belief in every public and private place, and
are ever on their guard, but it is in their studios that they have set
up their gods and established their doctrines most firmly.
One of these young men, whom I had known at college, took me to his
studio last summer, and asked me to tell him how I liked it. It was
a most embarrassing question to me, for to my untrained eye the
rooms seemed to be stricken with poverty, and so bare as to appear
untenanted. I said, at last, that he had a very fine view from his
windows.
"Yes, but you say nothing of the room itself," he protested; "and I
have spent so much time and thought on it. I have been a year and a
half in arranging this room."
"But there is nothing in it," I objected; "you couldn't have taken a
year and a half to arrange these things. There is not enough of them.
It shouldn't have taken more than half an hour."
He smiled with a sweet, superior smile, and shook his head at me. "I am
afraid," he said, "that you are one of those people who like studios
filled with tapestries and armor and palms and huge, hideous chests
of carved wood. You are probably the sort of person who would hang a
tennis-racket on his wall and consider it decorative. _We_ believe in
lines and subdued colors and broad, bare surfaces. There is nothing in
this room that has not a meaning of its own. You are quite right; there
is very little in it; but what is here could not be altered or changed
without spoiling the harmony of the whole, and nothing in it could be
replaced or improved upon."
I regarded the studio with renewed interest at this, and took a mental
inventory of its contents for my own improvement. I was guiltily
conscious that once at college I had placed two lacrosse-sticks over
my doorway, and what made it worse was that I did not play lacrosse,
and that they had been borrowed from the man up-stairs for decorative
purposes solely. I hoped my artist friend would not question me too
closely. His room had a bare floor and gray walls and a green door.
There was a long, low bookcase, and a straight-legged table, on which
stood, ranged against the wall, a blue and white jar, a gold Buddha,
and a jade bottle. On one wall hung a gray silk poke-bonnet, of the
fashion of the year 1830, and on another an empty gold frame. With the
exception of three chairs there was nothing else in the room. I moved
slightly, and with the nervous fear that if I disturbed or disarranged
anything the bare gray walls might fall in on me. And then I asked him
why he did not put a picture in his frame.
"Ah, exactly!" he exclaimed, triumphantly; "that shows exactly what
you are; you are an American philistine. You cannot see that a picture
is a beautiful thing in itself, and that a dead-gold frame with its
four straight lines is beautiful also; but together they might not be
beautiful. That gray wall needs a spot on it, and so I hung that gold
frame there, not because it was a frame, but because it was beautiful;
for the same reason I hung that eighteen-thirty bonnet on the other
wall. The two grays harmonize. People do not generally hang bonnets on
walls, but that is because they regard them as things of use, and not
as things of beauty."
I pointed with my stick at the three lonely ornaments on the solitary
table. "Then if you were to put the blue and white jar on the right of
the Buddha, instead of on the left," I asked, "the whole room would
feel the shock?"
"Of course," answered my friend. "Can't even you see that?"
I tried to see it, but I could not. I had only just arrived in Paris.
There was another artist with a studio across the bridges, and his love
of art cost him much money and some severe trials. His suite of rooms
was all in blue, gray, white, and black. He said that if you looked at
things in the world properly, you would see that they were all gray,
blue, or black. He had painted a gray lady in a gray dress, with a blue
parrot on her shoulder. She had brown lips and grayish teeth. He was
very much disappointed in me when I told him that lips always looked
to me either pink or red. He explained by saying that my eyes were not
trained properly. I resented this, and told him that my eyes were as
good as his own, and that a recruiting officer had once tested them
with colored yarns and letters of the alphabet held up in inaccessible
corners, and had given me a higher mark for eyesight than for anything
else. He said it was not a question of colored yarns; and that while
I might satisfy a recruiting sergeant that I could distinguish an
ammunition train from a travelling circus, it did not render me a
critic on art matters. He pointed out that the eyes of the women in the
Caucasus who make rugs are trained to distinguish a hundred and eighty
different shades of colors that other eyes cannot see; and in time, he
added, I would see that everything in real life looked flat and gray.
I took a red carnation out of my coat, and put it over the gray lady's
lips, and asked him whether he would call it gray or red, and he said
that was no argument.
He suffered a great deal in his efforts to live up to his ideas, but
assured me that he was much happier than I in my ignorance of what
was beautiful. He explained, for instance, that he would like to put
up some of the photographs of his family that he had brought with him
around his room, but that he could not do it, because photographs were
so undecorative. So he kept them in his trunk. He also kept a green
cage full of doves because they were gray and white and decorative,
and in spite of the fact that they were a nuisance, and always flying
away, and being caught again by small boys, who brought them back, and
wanted a franc for so doing. He suffered, too, in his inability to
find the shade of blue for his chair covers that would harmonize with
the rest of his room. He covered the furniture five times, and never
successfully, and hence the cushions of his lounge and stiff chairs
were still as white as when they had last gone to the upholsterer's.
These young men are friends of mine, and I am sure they will not
object to my describing their ateliers, of which they were very proud.
They believed in their own schools, and in their own ways of looking
at art, and no one could laugh or argue them out of it; consequently
they deserved credit for the faith that was in them. They are chiefly
interesting here as showing how a young man will develop in the
artistic atmosphere of Paris. It is only when he ceases to develop,
and sinks into the easy lethargy of a life of pleasure there, that he
becomes uninteresting.
There was still another young man whom I knew there who can serve here
now as an example of the American who stops in Paris too long.