MEN AND HUSBANDS
Comic papers on both sides of the Atlantic have adopted the marriages
between American women and English men of the upper classes as a
standing joke; one of those jokes of which the public never gets tired,
whose infinite variety repetition does not stale. The fun lies in the
idea of barter. The Englishman has a title. The American woman has
dollars. He lays a coronet at her feet. She hands money bags to him.
Essentially the joke is the same on whichever side of the Atlantic it is
made. But there is a slight difference in the way the parts of it are
emphasized. The tendency among American humorists is to dwell a little
on the greed of the Englishman, who is represented as incapable of
earning money for himself. The English jester lays more stress on the
American woman's desire to be called "my lady," and pokes sly fun at the
true democrat's fondness for titles. I appreciate the joke thoroughly
wherever it is made, and I invariably laugh heartily at it. But I
decline to take it as anything more than a joke. It is not a precise and
scientific explanation of fact.
There are a great many marriages between American women of large or
moderate fortune and English men, or other Europeans, of title. That is
the fact. No doubt the dollars are as attractive to noblemen as they are
to anybody else. There are a number of pleasant things, steam yachts,
for instance, which can be got by those who have dollars, but not by
those who are without them. They may occasionally be the determining
factor in the choice of a wife. But I feel sure that most Englishmen,
when they marry American women, do so because they like them. They marry
the woman, not the money. In the same way a title is a very pleasant
thing to have. I have never enjoyed the sensation and never shall, but I
know that it must be most agreeable to be styled "Your Grace," or to
have a coronet embroidered on a pocket handkerchief. But I do not
believe that American women marry coronets. They marry men. The coronet
counts, I daresay, but the man counts more.
It is interesting to notice that, although there are many marriages
between American women and Englishmen, there are comparatively few
marriages between English women and American men. If it were a mere
question of exchanging money for titles we might expect English women of
title to marry American men. There are a great many English women with
titles and a great many rich American men. They might marry each other,
but they do not, not, at all events, in large numbers. It is true that
the woman cannot, unless she is a princess, give her husband a title, as
a man can give a title to his wife. But it is no small thing to have a
wife with a title. It is a pleasure well worth buying, if it is to be
bought. But apparently it is not. The English woman of title prefers to
marry an English man, however rich Americans may be. The American man
prefers American women, though none of them have titles. Exact
statistics about these marriages are not available, but we may take the
vitality of current jokes as an indication of what the facts are. The
joke about the marriage between Miss Sadie K. Bock, daughter of the
well-known dollar dictator of Capernaum, Pa., U.S.A., and the Viscount
Fitzeffingham Plantagenet, is fresh and always popular. But no one ever
made a joke about a marriage between the dollar dictator's son and Lady
Ermyntrude. There would be no point in that joke if it were made because
the thing does not happen, or does not happen often enough to strike the
popular imagination.
The truth appears to be that American women, apart from any question of
their dowries, are attractive both to English and American men. English
men, on the other hand, are attractive both to English and American
women.
I occupy in this investigation the position of an unprejudiced outsider.
I am neither English nor American, but Irish, and I can afford to
discuss the matter without passion, since Irish women are admittedly
more attractive than any others in the world and Irish men are seldom
tempted to marry outside their own people. A very wise English lady, one
who has much experience of life, once said that young Englishmen of good
position are lured into marrying music hall dancers, a thing which
occasionally happens to them, because they find these ladies more
entertaining and exciting than girls of their own class. I do not know
whether this is true or not, but if it is it helps to explain the
attractiveness of American women. There is always a certain
unexpectedness about them. They are always stimulating and agreeable. It
is much more difficult to account for the attractiveness of the English
man.
The manners of a well-bred English man are not superior to those of a
well-bred American man. Nor are they inferior. Looked at superficially,
they are the same. As far as mere conventional behavior toward women is
concerned, there is no difference between an Englishman and an American.
A well-mannered Englishman rises up and opens the door for a woman when
she leaves the room. So does a well-mannered American. The Englishman
hands tea, bread and butter or cake to a woman before he takes tea,
bread and butter or cake for himself. So does the American. The outward
acts are identical. But there is a subtle difference in the spirit which
inspires them. The English man does these things because he is
chivalrous. His manners are based on the theory "Noblesse oblige." The
woman belongs to the weaker sex, he to the stronger. All courtesy is
therefore due to her. This is the theory which underlies the behavior of
Englishmen to women. Good manners are a survival, one of the few
survivals, of the old idea of chivalry; and chivalry was the nobly
conceived homage of the strong to the weak, of the superior to the
inferior. The American, performing exactly the same outward acts, is
reverent. And reverence is essentially the opposite of chivalry. It is
not the homage of the strong to the weak, but the obeisance of the
inferior in the presence of a superior.
This difference of spirit underlies the whole relationship of men to
women in England and America. It helps to explain the fact that the
feminist movement in England is much fiercer than it is in America. The
English feminist is up against chivalry and wants equality. The American
woman, though she may claim rights, has no inducement to destroy
reverence.
I should be very sorry to think, I should be mad to say, that this
difference in spirit has anything to do with the attractiveness of
Englishmen, considered not as temporary companions, but as husbands. But
there are, or once were, people who held the theory that the natural
woman—and all women are perhaps more or less natural—prefers as a
husband the kind of man who asserts himself as her superior. "O. Henry"
has a story of a woman who learned to respect and love her husband only
after she had goaded him into beating her. Up to that point she had
despised him thoroughly. Other novelists, deep students of human nature
all of them, have worked on the same scheme. They are quite wrong, of
course. But if they were right they might quote the Englishman's
invincible chivalry as the reason of his attractiveness; maintaining,
cynically, that a woman prefers, in a husband, that kind of homage to
the reverence that the American man continually offers her.
The American man strikes me as more alert than the Englishman. If this
were noticeable only in New York, I should attribute the alertness to
the climate. The air of New York is extraordinarily stimulating. The
stranger feels himself tireless, as if he could go on doing things of an
exhausting kind all day long without intervals for rest. It would be
small wonder if the natives of the place were eager beyond other men.
But they are not more eager and alert than other Americans. Therefore we
cannot blame, or thank, the climate for these qualities. They must
depend upon some peculiarity of the American nervous system, unless
indeed they are the result of living under the American constitution. A
man would naturally feel it his duty to be as alert as he could if he
felt that his country was preeminently the land of progress and that all
the other countries in the world were more or less old-fashioned and
effete. But wherever the alertness comes from it is certainly one of the
characteristics of the American man.
With it goes sanguineness. Every man who undertakes any enterprise looks
at it from two points of view. He thinks how very nice life will be if
the enterprise succeeds. He also considers how disagreeable things will
become if, for any reason, it fails to come off. The Englishman, unless
he is a politician, is temperamentally inclined to give full weight to
the possibility of failure. The American dwells rather on the prospects
of success. There are, of course, a great many sanguine Englishmen. Most
Members of Parliament, for instance, must be extraordinarily hopeful,
otherwise they would not go on expecting to get things done by voting
and listening to speeches. Some Americans, though not many, are cautious
to the point of being almost pessimistic. But, broadly speaking,
Americans are more sanguine than Englishmen. That is why so many new
faiths, and new foods, come from America. Only a very hopeful people
could have invented Christian Science or expect to be benefited by
eating patent foods at breakfast time. That is also, I imagine, why
Americans drink so much iced water. Conscious of the dangers of being
too sanguine, they try to cool down their spirits in the way which is
generally recognized as best for reducing excessive hopefulness. To pour
cold water on anything is a proverbial expression. The Americans pour
gallons of very cold water down their throats, which shows that they are
on the watch against the defects of their high qualities.
With the alertness and hopefulness there goes, inevitably, a certain
restlessness. "Better the devil you know than the devil you don't" is a
proverb which appeals to the English man. It could never be popular in
America. The American, if he made up his mind to go in for the
acquaintance of devils at all, would be inclined to try the newer kinds,
not merely because he would be hopeful about them, but because he would
feel sure that the old ones would bore him. He would never settle down
to a monotonous cat and dog life with a thoroughly familiar devil. The
Englishman prefers to remain where he is unless the odds are in favor of
a change being a change for the better. The American will make a change
unless he thinks it likely to be a change for the worse.
We were greatly struck while we were in America by the fact that there
were very few gardens there. The season of the year, late autumn, was
not, indeed, favorable to gardens. Still I think we should have
recognized flower beds and the remains of flowers if we had seen them.
At first we were inclined to think that Americans do not care for
flowers; but we were constantly assured, on unimpeachable authority,
that they do. And we were not dependent on mere assertion. We saw that
Americans adorn their rooms with cut flowers, sometimes at huge expense.
They must therefore like flowers. They also, we were told, like growing
them; but as a matter of fact they do not grow them to anything like the
same extent that flowers are grown in England or Ireland. We used to ask
why people who like flowers and would like to grow them have so few
gardens. We got several answers. The climate, of course, was one. But it
is not fair to make the climate responsible for too many things. Besides
the climate, as I have said before, is not the same all over America. It
is difficult to believe that it is everywhere fatal to gardening.
Another answer—a much more satisfactory one—was that it takes time to
create a garden, and Americans do not usually stay long enough in one
house to make it worth while to start gardening. It is plainly an
unsatisfactory thing to inaugurate a herbaceous border in 1914 if you
are likely to leave it early in 1915. As for yew hedges and delights of
that kind, no one plants them unless he has a good hope that his son
will be there to enjoy them after he has gone. The American, so we were
told, and so of course believed, is always looking forward to moving
into a new house. This is because he is alert, sanguine and a lover of
change. The Englishman is inclined to settle down in one house, and it
is very difficult to root him out of it. Therefore gardens are commonly
possible in England and rarely so in America.
We did indeed see some gardens in America, and they were tended with all
the care which flower lovers display everywhere. We saw in them plants
brought from very different places, round which there doubtless gathered
all sorts of associations, whose blossoms were redolent with the perfume
of happy memories as well as their own natural scents. But these gardens
belonged to men who either through the necessity of their particular
occupation or through some eccentricity of character felt that they were
likely to remain in one place.
Gardens are generally best loved and most carefully tended by women. I
have known men who took a real interest in plants, but for the most part
men who spend their leisure hours in gardens occupy themselves in mowing
the grass or scuffling the walks. They will trim the edges of flowerbeds
with shears, they will sometimes even dig, but their hearts are not with
the growing plants. Often they confess as much openly, saying without
shame that mowing is capital exercise after office hours, or that the
celery bed must be properly trenched if it is to come to perfection. No
one who works in this spirit is a gardener, nor is a man who merely
desires a tidy trimness. To the real gardener neatness is an unimportant
detail. It is better that a flower should grow in a bed with ragged
edges than that it should wither slowly in the middle of the trimmest of
lawns. It is women, far oftener than men, who possess or are possessed
by the instinct for getting things to grow. It is after all a sort of
mother instinct, since flowers, like children, only respond to those who
love them. Probably every woman who has the mother instinct has the
garden instinct too, and most women, we may be thankful for it, are
potentially good mothers.
Perhaps it is the fact that he is content to stay still long enough to
render gardens possible which makes the Englishman attractive as a
husband. It is easy to understand that there is something very
fascinating to a garden lover in the prospect of attachment to one
particular spot. It is a great thing to feel: "Here I shall live until
the end of living comes, and then my sons will live here after me. All
the rockeries I build, all the trees I plant, all my pergolas and rose
hedges are for delight in coming years, for delight still in the years
beyond my span of living." This instinct for a settled home, of which a
garden is the symbol, is surely stronger in woman than in any man. Woman
is after all the stable part of humanity. Man fights, invents, frets,
fusses and passes. Woman is the link between the generations. Man makes
life possible and great. It is woman who continues life, hands it on.
Her nature requires stability. She feels after settledness in the hope
of finding it.
If I were a philosopher I should pursue these speculations and write
several pages about men and women which it would be very difficult for
any one to understand. But I have no taste for hunting elusive thoughts
among the shadows of vague words. I am content to note my little facts;
that American men are more restless than Englishmen, that there are
fewer gardens in America than in England, that most women like gardens,
and that there are more marriages between American women and Englishmen
than between English women and American men.
I came across a curious example of American restlessness a little while
ago. There was a footman, very expert in his business, who lived and
earned good wages in an English house. He was an ambitious footman, and,
though his wages were good, he wanted them to be better still. His
opportunity came to him. An American wanted a valet and was prepared to
pay very large wages indeed. The footman offered his services, and
being, as I said, a very good footman, he secured the vacant position,
and the wages which were far beyond any he would ever have earned in
England. At the end of two years he happened to meet the butler under
whom he had served in the English house. The butler congratulated him on
his great wealth. The footman, now a valet, replied that there are
several things in the world better worth having than money.
"I haven't," he said, "slept a fortnight at a time in the same bed since
I left you, and it's killing me."
Now that would not have killed or gone near killing an American born
footman, if there is such a thing as an American born footman. He would
have enjoyed it, just as his master did; for that American, being very
wealthy, could if he liked have slept in the same bed every night for a
year, every night for many years, until indeed the bed wore out. He
preferred to vary his beds as much as possible. He had, no doubt, many
beds which were in a sense his own, beds in town houses, beds in
shooting boxes, beds in fishing lodges, beds in Europe, beds which he
had bought with money and to which he had an indefeasible title as
proprietor. But not one of these was, as an Englishman would understand
the words, his own bed. There was not one to which he came back after
wandering as to a familiar resting place. They were all just couches to
sleep on, to be occupied for a night or two, indistinguishable from
those which he hired in hotels.
I am told that the English are learning the habit of restlessness from
the Americans, as indeed they have learned many other things. If they
learn it thoroughly they will, I think, have to give up the hope of
being able to marry wealthy American women. Their titles will not
purchase desirable brides for them if they are no longer able to offer
settled homes. According to a very learned German historian, it was the
introduction of the "_stabilitas loci_" ideal into the western rules
which made monasticism the popular career it was in the church. It is
his old fondness for settling down and staying there which made the
Englishman so popular as a husband.