uneasily, that she is as good as anybody else. For some unspoken reason
you never ask her if every one else is as good as she. You recall what
de Tocqueville wrote eighty years ago: “If I were asked to what the
singular prosperity and growing strength of that [American] people
ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply--to the superiority of
their women.”
Of all so-called civilized women, she makes the greatest variation
in her treatment of those of her own and those of the other sex.
Toward women she is apt to be dull, splenetic, outspoken about what
she esteems the faults of others. Even the weaknesses of her husband
she analyzes to their friends--herein is a fertile source of divorce.
Toward women, you observe, she is apt to be metallic, rattling, and
uncharitable, or possibly over-social, relieving the peccant humors of
her mind and attitudinizing upon what she esteems a man’s estimate of
women--to please the sex she is not of. To men she is pert, flippant,
witty, caustic, rapid, graceful, and gay. At times she amuses them
and herself by slurring upon other women. She seems to leave it to
the man to establish the spirit upon which the two shall meet; and
by deft hand and turn and movement she is constantly suggesting her
eternal variation from him. The woman is always chaste. It follows that
marriages are many.
A not uncommon fruit of marriage vows is an application for divorce,
which she estimates with such levity and mental smack that you would
hesitate to bring a young girl to her presence.
“Has she applied, do you know?”
“Oh! they’ve separated.”
“On what grounds is she going to get it?”
“If she isn’t careful she’ll lose her case by seeing him too often.”
These are a few of many such sentences heard from her lips in public
places.
Nothing higher than what an ordinary civil contract seeks seems to
be sought in her marital affairs. She undoes the decree of old Pope
Innocent III., to whom is ascribed the ordination of marriage as a
function of his church and the claim of its sanctified indissolubility.
In the light of her action marriage is truly and purely a civil
contract, and devoid of that grace, resignation, forbearance, patience,
tenderness, sweetness, and calm which make it truly religious.
She is strong, she is hopeful, she is ardent. She knows herself and her
power--that it is of the flesh which aims at prettiness. The divine
beauty of spirit in the countenance she does not know. In her midst
Fra Angelico would find few sitters. Her religion, commonly that
which in other ages passed from a propulsive, burning spirit to frozen
formalism, is the crystallized precept of theologue and priest, the
fundamental ecstasy and informing soul having long since departed. If
she had a real religion she could not be what she is.
Those questions of our day that shove their gaunt visages into
sympathetic minds she has little knowledge of, and little of that
curiosity which leads to knowledge. The fashion of her gown and the
weekly relays at the theatre are nearer to her heart, and to her
thinking touch her more personally, than the moral miasmata and
physical typhoids of her neighboring Poverty Flat. Both pests the
adjustment of her household relations brings within her door. For
her dwelling is commonly domesticked by dusky shapes upon whom also
the real things of life sit lightly, to whom permanence and serious
thought and work are rare. Their engagement is by the week, like that
of pitiful vaudeville associates, and their performance as surpassingly
shallow. They come upon their stage of work, veneer their little task
with clever sleight of hand, and roll off to the supine inertness and
inanity of their cabin.
This woman has therefore in her hands no feeling of the real relation
and friendship that grow between mistress and maid who live the joys
and sorrows of years together. By the less fortunate themselves, as
well as by her own shallow skimming, her sympathies with the less
fortunate are dwarfed. She looks upon her domestic as a serving
sub-human animal, infinitely below herself, tolerated because of
its menial performance, and barely possessed of the soul which
her ecclesiastical tradition says is in every human form. In this
deflection of her moral sense, can the hand of secular justice be
punishing the wrong-doing of past centuries--the bringing in putrid
slave-ships the captured, dazed, Eden-minded, animal-man--“the
blameless Ethiopian”--to our shores?
She is born of fine material. When her nature is awry it is because of
lack of right incentive. Old measures and life estimates are absurd
to her quick senses, and none of the best of our modern values are
put in their place. Her creed is wholly at variance with the facts
of life to-day. If substantial instruction had entered the formative
period of her life, there would have been no substance to project the
darker parts of her shadow. Her nature is now ill-formed because of
the misdirection of its elemental forces. She knows the tenor of her
empire, and in truth and secretly she wonders how long her reign will
endure.
“And therefore,” says Aristotle, in his Politics, “women and children
must be trained by education with an eye to the state, if the virtues
of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtue of
the state. And they must make a difference, for children grow up to be
citizens, and half the persons in a state are women.”
* * * * *
Abiding beside this overdressed woman is an underdressed man. His first
striking quality is a certain sweet-natured patience--a result of his
optimistic dwelling in the future. Not content with the present, and
having forgotten the values of present-day simple life, he lives in a
future of fictitious money values. “All human power,” he thinks, with
Balzac, “is a compound of time and patience. Powerful beings will and
wait.” He knows his power and he waits.
“It’s going to be worth a good deal.”
“In a few years, that’ll be a good thing.”
“Fifteen years from now it’ll sell for ten times its present value.”
People have called him deficient in imagination. Not since the old
Greeks have there been such ideal seekers upon this golden nugget of
our solar system which we call the earth; nor since the old Hellenes
has there been such an idealistic people as that of which he is a
part. In Elizabeth’s time, indeed, there was imaginative vigor similar
to his. Then as now they were holding the earth in their hands and
standing on the stars to view it as it whirled.
Instead of turning his fertile thought toward art or literature, he
bends it first of all to material things. Schemes for developing
land, for dredging rivers, for turning forests into lumber or railway
ties, for putting up sky-scrapers facing four avenues; schemes for
building and controlling transcontinental railways and interoceanic
fleets; schemes for raising wheat by the million bushels and fattening
cattle by hundreds of thousands; schemes for compressing air, gas,
cotton, beef; for domestic and foreign mining; for irrigation; for
oil borings--he brings his dynamic energy and resourcefulness to the
evolution of all things but the human who is to be yoked to work out
his plan.
In theory he is democratic and humane--for the future, after his
interests in dividends shall have ceased. But his reckless exploiting
of human life for the present, now growing more and more common by
means of impersonal agents, is distinctly at war with our foundation,
democratic ideas which hold one man’s life as good as another’s and
which made his existence possible.
An essentially material basis of life turns his natural idealism into
practical values and activities. He is an ideal practician, or rather
a practical idealist.
His unnatural attitude toward to-day--that is, his futurity--and
his inconsiderateness for to-day’s sunshine, put him in a false
position, which bears the fruit of self-consciousness. Nature
is not self-conscious. The primal man was not self-conscious.
Self-consciousness implies pain; it means that a fellow-being is not at
one with his surroundings; that extraneous, false, or hostile things
are pushing him from his native status. If his pain, whether physical
or spiritual, is eased, morbidness disappears.
In this man’s self-conscious habit he jumps at once to the conclusion
that if you do not like his town you do not like him. Your taste is a
personal affront. There is no logical connection, but he has a certain
“defect of heat” which Dean Swift avers lies in men of the Anglo-Saxon
type. The cordiality and open-handedness with which he first met you
wanes. That he has one of the best of hearts, and one of the strongest
of heads, you are sure. He inwardly has the same faith. He knows it as
Achilles knew his own strength, and the knowledge gives him sometimes
the leonine front which the son of silver-footed Thetis boasted. But
your not recognizing the superiority of his physical and spiritual
environment over all the world causes an irritation deeper than the
epidermis--to the nerve-centres, in fact.
“What do you think!” he laughed, shaking burlily and plunging hands
in pockets. “What do you think! The other day in Washington I met an
Englishman, and when I told him the United States was the best country
in the world, and the State I lived in the best State in the best
country, and the town I lived in the best town in the best State, and
the block my office was in the best block in the best town, and my
office the best office in the best block----”
“And you the best man in the best office,” I interjected, to which he
laughed a hearty affirmative.
“What do you think he said? Why, ‘Comfohtaable, awh! comfohtaable!’ I
told him it _was_ comfortable,--damned comfortable.”
This very Englishman, with that condescension of manner which at times
we see foreigners assume, declared such mental individualization to be
purely American. Vanity, audacity, and self-appreciation exist among
all peoples, and even from the banks of the Isis we hear how the late
Dr. Jowett averred, “I am the Master of Baliol College; Baliol is the
first college in Oxford; Oxford is the first city in England; England
is the first country in the world.”
United with the feeling of personal worth and independence
in this citizen by the Big Muddy is, paradoxically, another
characteristic--namely, a great tolerance. He could hardly expect
tolerance himself if he did not extend it to another who may have
opinions diametrically opposed to his own, is probably his attitude
of mind. He is in his way a sort of embodiment of the spirit of our
national constitution.
But this largess of broad tolerance leaves him lacking a gift of
the discriminating or critical judgment. The sense or feeling of
quality--that which measures accurately spiritual and artistic
values--his very breadth and practical largeness, his democracy, allow
no growth to. A sensitive discrimination, the power of differentiation,
is no natural endowment, but a result of training, mental elimination,
comparison, association, and a dwelling in inherent spiritual values.
Through his worth and capacity in other directions he would have this
quality if he “had time” and seclusion for thought. But his life
makes it possible for an explosive and heated talker, a mouther of
platitudinous phrase, to stand cheek by jowl in his esteem with a seer
of elevation and limpid thoughtfulness. His estimate of even lighter
publicities is tinctured by this defect--the theatrical, for instance,
where a verdant girl, lavishing upon her ambition for the stage the
money she inherited from a father’s patent syrup or pills, and an
actress of genius and experience fall in his mind in the same category
because a theatrical syndicate has equally advertised each.
What the result to politics of this indiscriminating and non-sagacious
judgment, this lack of feeling for finer lines in character--mark,
peculiar nature, as Plato means when he uses the word in the
Phædrus--would be hard to estimate.
Although for the most part a private citizen absorbed in his own
affairs, the holder of an office has to him a peculiar glamour. He is
apt to fall into the thinking lines of writers of nameless editorials,
who, forgetful of their own hidden effulgence, fillip at quiet folk
as “parochial celebrities” and “small deer.” And yet he knows that
he lives in an age of réclame, and that by the expenditure of a few
dollars in direct or indirect advertisement a name may be set before
more people than our forefathers numbered on the first Independence Day.
In his midst is a certain publicity of spirit, and in his estimation
work undertaken in the sight of men is of a higher order than that done
in the privacy of one’s closet. The active life is everything; the
contemplative, nothing. Talking is better than writing--it so easily
gives opportunity for the aggressive personality. For a young woman
looking to support herself he advocated type-writing in a public office
in preference to the retirement of nursery governess. When the girl
drew back with the dread of publicity which results from the retired
life of women, he exclaimed, “It’s all a question of whether you’ve got
the courage to take the higher thing.”
If he is a fruit of self-cultivation, he enjoys talking of the viridity
of his growth as well as these now purpler days. During early struggles
he may have undergone suffering and privation. In that event, if his
nature is narrow and hard, he has become narrower and harder, and his
presence, like Quilp’s, shrivels and deadens every accretion save
his interest. But when he is of the better sort of soil, adversity
discovers the true metal, and misfortune gives him a sympathy, depth,
and tenderness that charm you to all defects. You would migrate to his
neighborhood to live in the light of his genial warmth. You think of
the beautiful encomium Menelaus pronounced upon Patroclus--“He knew how
to be kind to all men.”
Beyond all, he is open-eyed and open-eared. And above all he is
affirmative; never negative. His intuition tells him it is affirmation
that builds, and that Bacon says right--“it is the peculiar trait of
the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than
by negatives.”
“Why do people buy and read such fool stuff as ‘Treasure Island’? I
can’t see.”
“They read it for its story of adventure, and for its rare way of
telling the story,” I ventured, in answer. “They read it for its style.”
“Style! Gemini! Style! I should smile! I can write a better book than
that myself!”
“Then it might pay you as a business venture to set yourself about it.”
“It’s by a man named Stevenson, and he’s written other stories. Are
they all as bad?”
Strange he should make such a criticism of Louis Stevenson, in
literature pronouncedly the successful man. For success in the
abstract, and successful men and women in the concrete--the word
success is here used in its vulgar, popular sense, in reference to
material advancement, not to ethical or spiritual development--he
worships. Success is a chief god in his pantheon,--to have returns
greater than one’s effort or worth deserve. Yet he believes with the
author of Lorna Doone, “the excess of price over value is the true
test of success in life.” None of us would think of saying Shakespeare
was a success; or Milton; or John Brown; or Martin Luther. But Pope,
with his clever money-making, we might call a success, as did Swift in
1728: “God bless you, whose great genius has not so transported you as
to leave you to the constancy of mankind, for wealth is liberty, and
liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher.”
The means to end, the processes by which the successful issue of a
matter is gained, our neighbor of St. Louis tells you with a smile not
to be finikin about. Many who have had success have not been. Look at
all history, from Abraham to Joe Smith and Cecil Rhodes and many of
our millionaires. He himself is not, he declares, but his acts often
contradict his assertion. So long as a man, or a woman, “gets there,”
it does not matter much how. “Work through a corporation or trust,” he
tells you, and smiling at you with honest eyes, adds, “A corporation
can do things the individual man would not.” The one who succeeds is
the model; he is to be envied; he is the ideal the ancients sought--the
happy man. Pass by noblesse oblige, human heartedness, elevation
that would not stoop to exploit human labor, human need, and human
sacrifice--that is, as corporations pass these qualities by.
In short, let us, in fact, and not by legend alone, have the character
formerly ascribed by average English folk to the Yankee.
Assumption of excellence, he knows, goes far toward persuading people
that you have it. There is not so great difference in people after all,
this democrat believes. When one has every material privilege that will
allow him to assume, that will hedge and fence his assumption about,
he is pretty apt to succeed, he thinks, and be cried up as a man of
extraordinary virtue, of taste, of attainment. In any success, commonly
so-called, he asks little of the great marks by which a man should be
judged. “He has done this.” “He has got that.” “He is clever,” he says.
He rarely cries, “He is honest.” “He is true.”
Marriage he is not so apt as the brilliant woman beside him to consider
impermanent. This is wholly a result of convention, for women, by
their very nature and the conditions of married life, cling more
closely to the permanence of the union.
In marital relations he has more liberty. When she asks him if she may,
or in her phrase “can,” do so and so, and in rehearsing the matter
says he “let her,” he accepts her homage and the servile status she
voluntarily assumes. You exclaim that men for many centuries have been
apt to do this. Entirely, if offered him by such an enchantress.
“If she be small, slight-natured, miserable,
How shall men grow?”
Toward women, with all his subtlety, he is possessed of a certain
naïveté, which renders him a most agreeable companion, and much at the
mercy of such associates.
On an express leaving St. Louis at nine of the morning and headed
toward the East, two of these men were one day riding. A stretch of
level land, encrusted in snow and flooded with sunshine glowing warm
and yellow three weeks after the winter solstice, lengthened the way.
By three in the afternoon the sight of the passengers was strained from
the pulsation of the train, and reading gave place to lassitude.
“Say,” yawned one of the men, “do you think marriage is a failure?”
“Failure! failure!” answered the other. “The biggest kind of a success!
Failure! Holy smoke! Why I’ve just married my third wife. Failure! It
beats electric lights all hollow.”
“I don’ know,” answered the questioner, dyspeptically. “I don’ know. I
go home every week or ten days. My wife isn’t glad to see me. I’m going
home now. She won’t be glad. They think more of you when you’re not
home so much.”
“Whee-u-u-u,” whistled number two.
With a holiday on his hands no man is more awkward. The secret of
giving himself to enjoyment he does not know. His relaxation takes
crudest form. Holiday enjoyment means in many cases sowing money in
barbaric fashion, in every thinkable triviality that entails expense.
That which he has bent every nerve toward getting, for which he has
grown prematurely careworn, the possession of which vulgar philosophy
counts the summa summarium of life, this he must scatter broadcast, not
in the real things of art and literature and bettering the condition of
the less fortunate, but in sordid pleasure and vacuous rushing hither
and yon. It is his way of showing superiority to the cub who has not
the money-making faculty, or who holds different ideas of the value of
living. Upon such merrymaking he has been known to indulge in Homeric
laughter over his own excess, and in tones heralds used in the days of
Agamemnon. Physically he breathes deeper and is broader chested than
many men; he has more voice, and he puts it out the top of the throat.
To watch the purple dog-tooth violet push up through dead leaves in
March; to listen in his fragrant, sunlit spring to the song of the
thrush or the delectable yearning of the mourning-dove; to know the
quivering windflowers that freshen soil under oak and hickory--all this
is to him as the yellow primrose to Peter Bell. There is no pleasure
without an end--that end being money.
The blooded mare in his stable needs exercise and he likes not
another to drive her lest she lose response to his voice and hand.
But it is really a bore to drive; what interest is there in sitting
in a wagon and going round and round? He must be doing something. He
forgets the retaliation nature takes upon grooves in human life and
that discountenancing of innocent pleasures is the first step toward
dementia paralytica and the end of interest in his fair and buoyant
world. He will probably die suddenly in middle age, for he is too
extreme in expenditure of himself, and too small an eater of the honey
of life. Honey-eaters have terrene permanence.
* * * * *
This man and woman are not disproportionate neighbors. What will be
their record to the reading of Prince Posterity?
The lands that border the Big Muddy have more of the old American
spirit than the extreme East. The proportions of the old American
blood are there greater than upon the sea-coast, where Europeans of a
tradition far different from the ideals and enthusiasms of our early
comers have dropped and settled, and in such numbers that they can and
do knit their old mental and social habits into a garment which is
impervious to true American influences.
Our old American teachings!--for instance, the estimate of the
greatness of work, the dignity of labor of any sort whatever--that,
it was once claimed, was a great reason our republic existed to
demonstrate to the world the dignity of work, of bodily exertion
directed to some economic purpose, to produce use, adapt material
things to living. “That citizen who lives without labor, verily how
evil a man!”--’Αργὸος πολίτης χεῖνος ὡς χαχός γ’ ἀνήρ, and such
sentiments as this of Euripides dominated our democracy.
But in our eastern sea-coast cities, what with the development of an
idle, moneyed class, and the settling down of millions of immigrants,
the European conception of work’s inherent ignobleness has grown to
strong hold.
“Work is not a disgrace, but lack of work is a disgrace,” “Ἔργον δ
ουδὲν ὄνειδος, αεργίη δέ τ’ ὄνειδος. And Hesiod’s words hold to the
present day among genuine Americans.
Possibly with the great Middle West and its infinite “go,” optimism,
and constructive breadth, and with such men and women as these types by
the Big Muddy, the preservation of Americanism really lies--but it must
be with their greater spiritualization and greater moral elevation for
the future.
THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN
In order to give her praises a lustre and beauty peculiar and
appropriate, I should have to run into the history of her life--a task
requiring both more leisure and a richer vein. Thus much I have said in
few words, according to my ability. But the truth is that the only true
commender of this lady is time, which, so long a course as it has run,
has produced nothing in this sex like her.
BACON, OF QUEEN ELIZABETH
Die Ehelosigkeit eines Theils des weiblichen Geschlechts ist in
dem monogamischen Gesellschaftszustande eine nicht zu beseitigende
statistische Nothwendigkeit.
GUSTAVE SCHÖNBERG
THE NEW ENGLAND WOMAN
Throughout our fair country there has long been familiar, in actual
life and in tradition, a corporate woman known as the New England woman.
When this woman landed upon American shores, some two hundred and fifty
years ago, she was doubtless a hearty, even-minded, rosy-cheeked,
full-fleshed English lass. Once here, however, in her physical and
mental make-up, under pioneer conditions and influenced by our electric
climate, a differentiation began, an unconscious individualizing of
herself: this was far, far back in the time of the Pilgrim Mothers.