As the American marriage appears to be above all a partnership, so the
American family appears to be more than anything else an association,--a
sort of social camp, the ties of which are more or less strong according
to individual sympathies, such as might exist between people not of the
same blood. I am certain, not from anecdotes but from experience, that
the friendship of brother and brother, or sister and sister, is entirely
elective. So it is with the relations between father and son, mother and
daughter. A young Frenchman much in love with a New York girl said to
me, in one of those moments when the coldness of the woman you love
drives you to be cruelly frank:--
"She has so little heart that she went to the theatre five weeks after
her mother's death, and no one resented it."
I knew that he was telling the truth. But what did it prove? What do the
inequalities permitted by the laws of inheritance prove? Nothing, if not
that our natural characteristics, instincts, sensibilities, are not the
same as those of the people of this country. They have much less power
of self-giving, much more of personal reaction; and especially a much
stronger will. Their will rules their hearts as well as their minds.
This seems to us less tender. But are we good judges?
We must continually keep in mind this general want of association in
family life if we would in any degree understand the sort of
soul-celibacy, if we may use the term, which the American woman keeps
all through her married life. No more in this second period of her life
than in the first does love bear that preponderating part which seems to
us Frenchmen an essential characteristic of the lot of woman. When a
Parisian woman of forty reviews her life, the story that memory tells
her is the story of her emotions. To an American woman of the same age
it is more often the story of her actions,--of what she calls, by a word
I have before cited, her experiences. She gained, between the ages of
eighteen and twenty-five, a conception of her own self which was imposed
upon her neither by her traditions--she has none; nor by the
instructions of her parents--they never gave her any; nor even by her
own nature--for it is characteristic of these easily "adaptable" minds
that their first instincts are chaotic and undetermined. They are like a
blank check, which the will undertakes to fill out. But whatever the
will writes upon it, is written in letters that will never be effaced.
Action, action, always action,--this is the remorseless but unchanging
device of such a woman. Whether she seeks for a place in society, or is
ambitious for artistic culture, or addicts herself to sport, or
organizes "classes," as they say, for reading Browning, Emerson, or
Shakespeare, with her friends; whether she travels to Europe, India, or
Japan, or gives an "at home" to have some young girl among her friends
"pour" tea for her, be sure that she will be always and incessantly
active, indefatigably active, either in the lines of "refinement" or of
"excitement."
With what impressiveness these women utter both these words! which we
must not weary of returning to; for they perhaps sum up the entire
American soul. They are bandied about in conversation like two formulae,
in which are revealed the persistence of this creature, who, born of a
stern race, and feeling herself fine, wills to become finer and ever
finer; who, reared amid democratic surroundings, wills to become
distinguished and ever more distinguished; who, daughter of a land of
enterprise, loves to excite continually in herself the sensation of
over-strained nerves.
When you see ten, fifteen, thirty, fifty like this, the character of
eccentricity, which you first found in them by comparison with the women
of Europe, disappears. A new type of feminine attractiveness is revealed
to you, less affecting than irritating, enigmatic and slightly ambiguous
by its indefinable blending of supple grace and virile firmness, by the
alliance of culture and vigor, by the most thrilling nervous
sensitiveness and the sturdiest health. The true place of such a
creature in this society appears to you also, and the profound reason
why these men, themselves all action, leave these women free thus to act
with total independence. If it is permitted to apply an old legal term
to creatures so subtle, so delicate, these women are the delegates to
luxury in this utilitarian civilization. Their mission is to bring into
it that which the American has not time to create, and which he desires
to have:--the flower of elegance, something of beauty, and in a word, of
aristocracy. They are the nobility in this land of business, a nobility
developed by the very development of business; since the money which is
made in the offices comes at last to them, and manipulated by their
fingers, is transfigured, blossoming into precious decorations, made
intellectual in plays of fancy,--in fact, _unutilized_. A great artist,
foremost of this epoch by the ardor of his efforts, the
conscientiousness of his study, and the sincerity of his vision,--John
Sargent,--has shown what I have tried to express, in a portrait I saw in
an exhibition; that of a woman whose name I do not know. It is a
portrait such as the fifteenth-century masters painted, who back of the
individual found the real, and back of the model a whole social order.
The canvas might be called 'The American Idol,' so representative is it.
The woman is standing, her feet side by side, her knees close together,
in an almost hieratic pose. Her body, rendered supple by exercise, is
sheathed--you might say molded--in a tight-fitting black dress. Rubies,
like drops of blood, sparkle on her shoes. Her slender waist is
encircled by a girdle of enormous pearls, and from this dress, which
makes an intensely dark background for the stony brilliance of the
jewels, the arms and shoulders shine out with another brilliance, that
of a flower-like flesh,--fine, white flesh, through which flows blood
perpetually invigorated by the air of the country and the ocean. The
head, intellectual and daring, with a countenance as of one who has
understood everything, has for a sort of aureole the vaguely gilded
design of one of those Renaissance stuffs which the Venetians call
_soprarisso_. The rounded arms, in which the muscles can hardly be seen,
are joined by the clasped hands,--firm hands, the thumb almost too long,
which might guide four horses with the precision of an English coachman.
It is the picture of an energy at once delicate and invincible,
momentarily in repose; and all the Byzantine Madonna is in that face
with its wide-open eyes.
Yes, this woman is an idol, for whose service man labors, which he has
decked with the jewels of a queen, behind each one of whose whims lie
days and days spent in the ardent battle of Wall Street. Frenzy of
speculations in land, cities undertaken and built by sheer force of
millions, trains launched at full speed over bridges built on a
Babel-like sweep of arch, the creaking of cable cars, the quivering of
electric cars, sliding along their wires with a crackle and a spark, the
dizzy ascent of elevators, in buildings twenty stories high,
immense wheat-fields of the West, its ranches, mines, colossal
slaughter-houses,--all the formidable traffic of this country of effort
and struggle, all its labor,--these are what have made possible this
woman, this living orchid, unexpected masterpiece of this civilization.
Did not the very painter consecrate to her his intense toil? To be
capable of such a picture, he must have absorbed some of the ardor of
the Spanish masters, caught the subtlety of the great Italians,
understood and practiced the curiosities of impressionism, dreamed
before the pictures in basilicas like Ravenna, and read and thought. Ah,
how much of culture, of reflection, before one could fathom the secret
depths of one's own race! He has expressed one of the most essential
characteristics of the race,--the deification of woman, considered not
as a Beatrice as in Florence, nor as a courtesan as at Milan, but as a
supreme glory of the national spirit.
This woman can do without being loved. She has no need of being loved.
What she symbolizes is neither sensuality nor tenderness. She is like a
living object of art, the last fine work of human skill, attesting that
the Yankee, but yesterday despairing, vanquished by the Old World, has
been able to draw from this savage world upon which fate has cast him a
wholly new civilization, incarnated in this woman, her luxury and her
pride. Everything is illuminated by this civilization, at the gaze of
these fathomless eyes, in the expression of which the painter has
succeeded in putting all the idealism of this country which has no
ideal; all that which perhaps will one day be its destruction, but up to
the present time is still its greatness,--a faith in the human Will,
absolute, unique, systematic, and indomitable.
Copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.