Miss America
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
MISS AMERICA
PEN AND CAMERA SKETCHES
OF THE AMERICAN GIRL
BY
ALEXANDER BLACK
_Author of “Miss Jerry,” etc._
_WITH DESIGNS AND PHOTOGRAPHIC
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY THE AUTHOR_
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK: _M DCCC XC VIII_
_Copyright, 1898, by_
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
_All rights reserved_
University Press:
JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A.
TO
_THE AMERICAN GIRL WHOM
I HAVE KNOWN BEST_
MY WIFE
_THIS BOOK IS GRATEFULLY
AND AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED_
[Illustration]
_The_ APOLOGY:
_It will be suspected, perhaps, that in saying “sketches,” I have
wished to escape some of the responsibility which might have been
incurred by a more formal approach to a momentous theme, though the
entire truth of the description should carry its own justification.
And if the term be permitted in describing the text, it has equal
appropriateness in describing the pictures; for the photograph seldom
can be more than a sketch, and must be content with the limitations
as well as with the privileges of the sketch. The feminine eye will
discern unaided by data the chronological range of my pictures. To
other eyes, possibly, I should explain that the portraits represent a
period of six or seven years, and that those in conventional dress are
supplemented by various costume sketches with the camera recalling eras
in which there was no photography. What I have said of the American
type in the first chapter will explain my own difficulty in expressing
the American type by the aid of the lens, a difficulty which has not
been diminished by the privilege of wide travel. If I have not revealed
the geographical identity of any of the types reflected here, the
reservation may, I hope, seem to be as fully justified as certain other
reservations which the American girl herself so frequently chooses to
hold._
_I often have wished that it were easier to substitute for “American”
some name which should more specifically indicate the United States. It
is the United States girl I am talking about; it is the United States
spirit which I have sought to discover, and not the spirit of the wider
America of which the foreigner, and even the British foreigner, so
frequently, and so reasonably, seems to be thinking when he uses the
name “American.” Now that Miss America for the first time has seen her
soldier brothers go abroad to fight and to conquer, it may be that in
one way or another there will be a further modification of the term, in
which direction it would be difficult to say at this hour._
_Because this is an apology and not a mere preface, I may be
permitted, I hope, to express to the American girls in various States
of the Union, from Boston to San Antonio, who have sat before my
camera, my regret that I should have translated them so inadequately.
It would, indeed, be hard to do justice to the American girl, and one
well might hesitate to describe, or even to discuss her, were not her
always gracious generosity so safely to be looked for._
_A. B._
[Illustration: CONTENTS
I. THE AMERICAN TYPE _Page_ 1
II. THE TWIG 23
III. A CENTURY’S RUN 47
IV. STITCHES AND LINKS 75
V. “WHAT IS GOING ON IN SOCIETY” 95
VI. LACE AND DESTINY 121
VII. CHANCE AND CHOICE 143
VIII. THE NEW OLD MAID 165
IX. “AND SO THEY WERE MARRIED” 187]
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I
THE AMERICAN TYPE
[Illustration]
The tradition that the women of the region in which we live illustrate
all of those traits that give an abiding charm to the sex, is one that
sometimes may be unreasonable, perhaps even comic; yet it cannot be
discreditable. Balzac, who remarks somewhere that nothing unites men
so much as a certain conformity of view in the matter of women, may
seem unphilosophical when he remarks somewhere else upon the absurdity
of English women. His French antipathy has an unreasonably affirmative
sting. But we do not care how many Thackerays regard the English girl
as the bright particular flower of creation. We like and expect the
author of “The Newcomes” to say: “I think it is not national prejudice
which makes me believe that a high-bred English lady is the most
complete of all Heaven’s subjects in this world.” For the same reason
we delight in N. P. Willis’s confidence when he declares that “there
is no such beautiful work under the sky as an American girl in her
bellehood.” And Mr. Willis adds with the same whimsical consciousness
of national partiality: “I _think_ I am not prejudiced.”
Of course this instinctive preference is fundamental. We are prepared
to hear from science that the African savage prefers the thick lips
and flat nose of the African girl to any other sort; that this is why
the African girl has a flat nose and thick lips; that gallantry is a
phase of natural selection, and so on. We can understand that there is
a merely relative difference of attitude between the savage lover who
woos his lady with a club, and the modern suitor who swears to give
up all of his clubs for her sake. What perplexes us is our anxiety to
explain our modern instinct, and (what is more perplexing) our anxiety
to explain _her_; to ascertain and even to catalogue her essential
traits--to discover, if not why we prefer the American girl, at least
what manner of girl it is that we thus are instinctively preferring.
What is the American type? Is the typical American girl as the British
novelist so often has described her--rich, noisy, wasp-waisted and
slangy? Is she a “Daisy Miller” or a “Fair Barbarian”? Is she what
Richard Grant White feared she too often was, “a creature composed in
equal parts of mind and leather”? Is she Emerson’s “Fourth of July of
Zoology,” or is she illustrating the discovery which Irving claimed to
have made among certain philosophers “that all animals degenerate in
America and man among the number”?
[Illustration]
From those foreigners who make a Cook’s tour examination of us, the
evidence in favor of the proposition that we grow more pretty and witty
women to the acre than any other country in the world, is overwhelming.
But there are obvious reasons why we must distrust this foreign
comment. Too often it plainly is a propitiatory item, when it is not
illustrating a flippant wish among men writers to occupy Disraeli’s
position “on the side of the angels.” That traveller has a profound
distaste for a country who does not find that it has pretty women.
If anything is more inevitable than this, it is that the traveller
will find fault with the type preferred by the men of the country he
is visiting. “What is most amazing,” says the observer in Zululand or
elsewhere, “is that the prettiest women, the women without this or that
hideous deformity, are not admired by the men.” The Kaffir prince on a
visit to England, or the Apache chief among the palefaces in the city
of the Great Father, invariably are astounded at the obtuseness of the
white men. I remember once listening to a group of New York artists who
were discussing preferred types of women, and it was agreed, with a
hopeless and resentful unanimity, that most New Yorkers preferred fat
women, since most of the good clothes and diamonds were worn by fat
women. All of which goes to show, perhaps, that natural selection is an
exclusive affair.
Probably even patriotism does not demand of us an admiration for the
beauty of the very first American girls--the dusky darlings of our
primitive tribes. These earliest American girls were not dowered with
the fatal gift of beauty as we understand beauty. Indeed, it is quite
generally admitted that the American Indian girl is not and never was
so pretty as the girls of some of the Pacific islands, for example.
Far be it from me to attack any precious traditions concerning the red
man, or the red woman, either. Far be it from me to touch with impious
hand the romantic panoply of Pocahontas. I am not writing a scientific
treatise. I have no point to prove. It is quite possible that there is
something distinctive in the personality of the Indian girl, whether
she be as poetry has painted her or as she stands in the analysis of
science. If I pass her by it is in no spirit of partisanship toward
either view. She is an old story, and some day when she is a new story
we may have occasion for surprise.
[Illustration]
The fact is that I must content myself here with a glance at the
American girl of more recent times, though she also will seem to be
an old story if we permit ourselves to remember the number of things
which have been said. We are not likely to forget the unction with
which foreign visitors sketched the daughters of Colonial America.
Indeed, we are in a measure dependent upon those sketches for a
knowledge of these ancestral daughters. As in all judgments of remote
appearances, we here must lean upon mere opinion. There was no camera
in the days of Priscilla, nor in the days of Dolly Madison, and painted
portraiture, unchallenged by the photograph, had reached heights of
admirable gallantry. For purposes of pictorial reconstruction we have
an enthusiastic description, the dubious confessions of a diary, a
charming little miniature or a mellowing canvas in an old frame, a
quaint gown, wrinkled by time; but we have no photograph. I hear
the Romanticist mutter, “Thank Heaven for _that_!” Alas! the
photograph is an expert witness, and how he can disagree! Was ever any
human specialist on the witness stand so dogmatic, so insinuating,
so sophistical as the photograph? Who, without an obstinately
anthropological mind, shall regret that the beginnings of our national
life are veiled in the Ante-Photographic era--that we may invest them
with qualities we wish they might have had, as well as with those
qualities of which we think we know? Who shall say that humanity, A.
P., dwelling in a softening haze beyond the harshly illuminated era of
Realism, is worse off than humanity thereafter? Looking at the matter
practically, who shall regret that Lady Washington never had her pretty
head in a vise, her face masked a ghastly white with powder to make
her countenance more actinic, and her eyes instructed to glare at a
fixed point for upward of sixty mortal seconds! Surely there are some
compensations in being handed down like the Iliad or the masonic ritual
by word of mouth rather than by agencies associated with the arrogant
stare of the lens.
But, after all, we do not conduct the trial wholly with expert
witnesses, and the camera has been a useful commentator--perhaps we
are more willing to say that it will be than that it has been, though
we never shall surpass in delicately literal perfection the image
of the daguerreotype. A new confusion may arise from the fact that
photography wants to be more than a science--is tired of being literal,
and seeks to be an art. If it shall become an art--that is to say, an
agency of personal opinion--posterity must, like ourselves, go on being
influenced in its judgments of pictorial fact by the expressions of
art, which the world has been doing from the beginning of time.
[Illustration]
Certainly it would be very hard for us to think of the English girl,
for example, however well we might know her personally, without feeling
the influence of the English artists, of Romney, and Reynolds, and
Sir John Millais, and Sir Frederick Leighton, and the multitudinous
expressions of her from the pencil of the author of “Trilby.” Du
Maurier’s English girl is an image, agreeable or not according to
one’s taste, which we cannot get out of our minds. A number of years
before he achieved a second fame by writing romances, Du Maurier made
a sketch in which he undertook to indicate his idea of a pretty woman.
He wrote of his ideal at that time: “She is rather tall, I admit, and
a trifle stiff; but English women _are_ tall and stiff just now;
and she is rather too serious; but that is only because I find it so
difficult, with a mere stroke of black ink, to indicate the enchanting
little curved lines that go from the nose to the mouth corners, causing
the cheeks to make a smile--and without them the smile is incomplete.”
I always have been glad to hear Mr. Ruskin say of the Venus of Melos,
with her “tranquil, regular and lofty features,” that she “could not
hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl,
of pure race and kind heart.”
[Illustration]
And in the same way our notion of the American girl, of the typical
American girl, is inevitably affected by the pictures we see of her.
Our illustrators naturally have the best opportunity to mould our
judgments in this matter. I recall hearing one woman say of another at
a tea: “That girl is always sitting around in Gibson poses.” They used
to say the same thing in England of the girls who imitated Du Maurier.
Thus we see that the illustrator of life not only is reflecting but
creating forms and manners; and if you would know not merely what the
American girl is, but what she is going to be, study the picture-makers
and story-makers who influence her.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Mr. Gibson would have us believe that Miss America is essentially a
statuesque girl, that, in general, there are good chances that she will
be tall, commanding, well-dressed, rather English in the shoulders. Mr.
Wenzell and Mr. Smedley present her to us as more willowy, with more of
what, if we had to go abroad for a prototype, we should be obliged to
call French grace and lightness. We have been under the spell of the
girl Castaigne can draw, have enjoyed the dainty femininity pictured by
Toaspern and Sterner and Mrs. Stephens. None has grudged a flattering
stroke, a prophetic outline. It is the old story. If we are to measure
a nation’s civilization by the degree of its deference to women, we
surely shall find much to confuse us in art, which in all lands, like
some joyous, enthusiastic child, always has heaped unstinted homage
at the feet of its goddesses, its Madonnas, its Magdalens and its
nymphs; which always has been ready to give to its fruit-venders and
flower-girls in the market-place the same refined beauty it bestows
upon its princesses; which has made its Pandoras beautiful with no
sign of resentment for any mischief its Pandoras ever may have done,
grateful only for the privilege of saying to the world as to her
precious private self, that she is very charming indeed. Germany, while
sending women to the plough, paints her radiantly as a deity, and when
England was selling wives at the end of a halter in the market-place,
there was no abatement in the ardor of her artistic tributes to
feminine loveliness.
[Illustration]
While the American artist has painted Miss America appreciatively,
with an enthusiasm creditable alike to his art and to his patriotism,
and seldom, surely, in the spirit of one who could say, “she _is_
rather stiff just now,” unquestionably, like the rest of us, he has
been bothered at times by the fact that she is so various, that she
has so many pictorial as well as temperamental and (may I say) vocal
variations.
There are several reasons why she should be various. The “Mayflower”
was a small ship and could not hold all of our ancestors. Like the
English who followed after the Conqueror, some of our ancestors had to
be content to “come over” at a later time, some of them at a shockingly
recent date. Thus we have greater divergences in type than exist in
countries wherein the “coming over” process was neither so protracted
nor from so many points of the compass. The American girl blossoms like
the pansy in so many and in such unexpected shades and combinations
that science falters, and bewildered art, determined to paint types
that will “stay put,” bolts for Brittany and sulkily draws sabots and
the Norman nose. We are a vast anthropological department store in
which the polite sociological clerk will show you human goods, not
only in the primary colors, but in every conceivable tint and texture;
and when you ask him, Is this foreign or domestic? he lies to meet the
requirements. Yes, Miss America sometimes, like our cotton, “comes
over” a second time with a foreign label, which _is_ puzzling!
It is our habit to think that the American girl of English ancestry
presents precisely the right modification of the--what shall I call
it?--austerity of the purely English type, and which scorns the
melancholy of Burne-Jones and Rossetti. The American girl of German
parents is conspicuously with us, and very often is found supplying a
fascinatingly fair phase without which our galaxy scarcely would be
complete, adding a delightful sparkle to the demureness which we might
not find so modified in Berlin or Bremen. The American girl of French
parentage is found uniting the traits of the people which has produced
De Staël, and Récamier and George Sand, to the perhaps not greatly
different vivacity of l’Américaine. We trace the auburn tresses of the
Scottish lass, the teasing Irish eyes, the winsome oval of the Dutch
face. We see the too emphatic contrasts of the Spanish, the Italian
and the Russian types mellowed and refined; while Oriental blood, the
civilized African, the octoroon and the occasional Asiatic each add an
element of picturesque variety.
And this is not saying a word about the differentiating fact that
this is a big country, and that Miss America in one section is by no
means the same as Miss America in another. I do not mean to say that
when we meet her in or from Boston we always know her by sight, but
when we come to average her in that neighborhood we are able to see
clearly enough that her quality is distinctive, that it is different
from the quality of Miss America elsewhere--in New York, for example,
where, by a trivial tradition, she is supposed to lay less stress upon
intellectuality, but where, under whatever guise of habit or manner,
you will find that she knows enough and has what she knows sufficiently
at her command to make you nervous. Again, the Philadelphia girl upsets
your preconceived notions, if you are foolish enough to have these,
by being nothing that suggests even remote relationship to the bronze
Quaker on the municipal tower. It is the familiar joke that the Boston
girl asks what you know, that the New York girl asks what you own,
and that the Philadelphia girl asks who your grandfather was. If this
amiable satire should have any foundation in fact, I wonder what the
Chicago girl is expected to ask. I myself have a theory, not wholly
dissociated from experience, that she does not ask anything, being
content to know that she, personifying the great traditionless middle
west, has been called the hardest riddle of them all.
And, as I have said, we must admit that geography has much to do with
the case. Does any one deny that climate and history have made the
Kentucky girl a being apart--that the Kentucky horses which she has
ridden with so much spirit have had their effect in her whole style and
personality? Could we fail to look for a distinctive flowering in the
verdant slopes beyond the Sierras or amid that intensely American human
environment on the plains of Texas? Have you heard the Creole sing?
Have you heard the music of the Georgia girl’s talk? Have you ever let
a Virginia girl drive you, or danced with Miss Maryland?
A southern dance! Perhaps it is inevitable that we should find
ourselves thinking of the Continental and early Federal society;
of old Georgetown and the powdered heads, and the minuet, and the
blinking candles behind the darkey orchestra; of the clinking swords
of the young Revolutionary soldiers, and the satin breeches of the
foreign lordlings, studying the precocious young republic and the
young republic’s daughters: of the quaint gowns Miss America used to
wear, and the taunting little caps and head-dresses, reflecting now
the whimsies of the Empire, now the furbelows of the Restoration, and
always her engagingly different self. Yes, time is working its
wizard tricks up and down the land, slowly here and quickly there,
now (as it might seem) in a romantic spirit, and again in brusque
paradoxical contrast to the thing we expect.
[Illustration]
We live quickly hereabouts, and to say that the vast changes which have
taken place in our national life have been mostly external is not to
say that the spectacle is on that account any easier to understand.
In an especial degree social situation with us, like the age limit
defining old maids, is wholly relative, subject to continual change.
To the foreign spectator who ignores this relativity, the American
girl naturally is bewildering, and we are likely to find her typified
in foreign comment in the words which Schlegel irreverently applied
to Portia, as a “rich, beautiful, clever heiress.” No, the typical
American girls are not all heiresses, nor all cow-camp heroines.
They were not always demure in the colonies, nor are they always
disconcertingly self-possessed in our own time. The girls with whom
Lafayette went sled-riding on the Newburg hills do not actually appear
to have been amazingly different from those who teased the Prince
of Wales in the fifties (I mean _our_ fifties), nor from those
who sent in their cards to Li Hung Chang in the nineties. It is very
shocking to us moderns, who let women preach and plead and vote,
to learn of the number of elopements in the days when women were
theoretically tethered to the spinning-wheel and forbidden everything
but hypocrisy. Which is to say, perhaps, that how much we shall regard
as distinctive in the modern woman may depend upon how little we happen
to know of the woman who has gone before.
But time and place must leave their mark, and Miss America, though
she be like changeable silk, of varying hue in varying lights,
is undoubtedly, being the precocious product of a new era in new
territory, a new variety in the species, as new as if she were
grotesquely instead of subtly different. And in her presence the
American himself frequently seems to be awed and quelled, like the
Greek hero when Athena’s “dreadful eyes shone upon him.” His devotion
to her has excited derision; his deference has been misconstrued,
his boastful admiration has been catalogued as characteristic. Italy
once spoke of England as “the paradise of women”; and England in a
later day began to say the same thing about the United States, which
may or may not have something to do with the “star of empire,” and
probably, in any case, has some definite relation to the Anglo-Saxon
spirit, concerning which so much has been said of late. As for Miss
America herself, the sovereignty at which the foreign observer marvels
is a real appearance, however profound the misapprehension of its
philosophy. Miss America is no illusion, if some spectators have
doubted their senses.
[Illustration]
By the grace of nature she is that she is. If the American man
continues to pay her the supreme compliment of not understanding her,
that is his affair. It always is easier to perceive the other’s
folly than our own--especially when the exciting cause is a woman. We
know better than the spectator why _we_ permit certain seeming
tyrannies! We analyze the American girl in a purely Pickwickian
spirit, not because we expect actually to discover facts, but for the
immediate pleasure of the speculation. We neither seek nor assume to
comprehend this marvellous organism. We know better. When we pretend
to delineate the American girl it is in the spirit of Fielding’s
aside in “Tom Jones”: “We mention this observation not with any view
of pretending to account for so odd a behavior, but lest some critic
should hereafter plume himself on discovering it.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
II
THE TWIG
[Illustration]
As I said one day to the Professor--
But first I must tell you about the Professor. She is a young
woman--young even in an era that classes authors among the “younger
writers” until they are sixty, and is pushing the “proper age at which
to marry” into the period of severe and undebatable maturity. She
is young, but she exemplifies that educated precocity tolerated and
fostered by our era. She knows the past like a book and the present
like a man. She does not vulgarly bristle with knowledge like the
first products of the higher education. Her acquirements sit upon her
less like starched linen than like a silken gown that flows with the
figure. She is the educated woman in her “second manner,” as the art
critics would say. I do not know what the educated woman’s third manner
will be. No one acquainted with the charms of the Professor could help
hoping that there never would be any.
The Professor graduated and post-graduated. She pottered in
laboratories, and at certain intervals wholly disappeared into the very
abysses of science. She read law tentatively, and made a feint at going
into medicine, but was deterred in each case, I fancy, by the fact,
repugnant to her exuberant energy, that a practice had to grow and
could not be mastered ready made. At one time there were both hopes and
fears that she would enter the ministry. Those who hoped banked on her
earnestness and wisdom. Those who feared quailed before her ruthless
independence and sense of humor. She delighted in the paradox of not
scorning social life, welcoming Emerson’s admonition with regard to
solitude and society by keeping her head in one and her hands in the
other. Indeed, she dances remarkably well when we consider that here
the dexterity is so far removed from the brain, and I have seen her
swim like--a mermaid, I suppose. She took a long course in cookery
for the pleasure of more pungently abusing certain of her lecture
audiences. One day when the plumbers didn’t come I saw her actually
“wipe a joint” in lead pipe with her own hands. Heaven knows where she
picked _that_ up!
When she accepted the position at the Academy, doubtless it was with a
view to certain liberties of action in the sociological direction. She
was not quite through with the college settlement idea, and I suspect
that she had a feeling that city politics at close range might be
productive to her in certain ways. Because she is neither erratic nor
formidable, she has experienced various offers of marriage, and has
shed them all without visible disturbance. Just at present, panoplied
in learning, tingling with modernity, yet always charmingly unconscious
of her power, she stands, poised and easy, like a sparrow on a live
wire.
In other words the Professor is one of those rare women with whom
you may enjoy the delights of a purely impersonal quarrel. She can
wrangle affectionately and cleave you in twain with a tender sisterly
smile. Indeed, she can make you feel of intellectual fisticuffs,
and, notwithstanding an occasional effect of too greatly accentuated
excitement, that it is, on the whole, a superior pleasure. And you
arise again conscious that she has no greater immediate grudge against
you than against St. Paul or any other of her historical opponents.
One day I asked the Professor, not with any controversial inflection,
what she thought of Herbert Spencer, a bachelor, talking about the
rearing of children.
“Well,” said the Professor, “it certainly is no more absurd than the
spectacle of Herbert Spencer analyzing love, or Ernest Renan doing the
same thing.”
“Mind you,” I went on, “I don’t say that the unmarried may not discuss
with entire competency--”
“I hope not,” interrupted the Professor. “I hope you wouldn’t say any
such absurd thing. Must a man have robbed a bank to write intelligently
of penology?”
[Illustration]
“My point is,” I went on--the Professor and I never take the slightest
offence at each other’s interruptions--“my point is that it almost
seems at times as if the unmarried should, in such an emergency,
assume, if they did not feel, a certain diffidence. To tell you the
truth, Professor, if it were not for you, I should doubt whether the
unmarried had a developed sense of humor.”
“That is simply pitiful,” flung the Professor. “Can you not see that
it is a sense of humor that keeps many people from marrying? But
that is not the point. Who is better fitted than Mr. Spencer, who
has enjoyed freedom from an entangling alliance, who is unbiased by
social situation or personal obligation, to discuss with scientific
judiciality the problems of child-rearing?”
“Theoretically, Professor, that is all right. But when Mr. Spencer
advises more sugar, it is awfully hard to forget that Mr. Spencer
never, presumably never, sat up nights with a youngster who had the
toothache. It is all very well for Mr. Spencer to suggest that when a
child craves more sugar it probably needs more sugar, but the parent
who manages his offspring on that basis is going to lose sleep. A good
rule, if you will permit me a platitude, is a rule that works. The way
that children _should_ be brought up is the way they _can_ be
brought up.”
[Illustration]
“My friend,” said the Professor--
Now, I am several years older than the Professor. By sheer age I am
entitled to her deference; but the Professor can ignore years as
well as sex or previous condition of servitude. Her impersonality is
adjusted to time, to space, and to matter. I am simply a Person.
“My friend,” said the Professor, “it is another platitude that there
is a right way to do everything, even to bring up children. The way
children are brought up probably is not right, and no theory or method
of bringing them up is, of course, or could be more than relatively
right. But in getting as near the right as we humanly may there is no
wisdom in despising the advice of the spectator. The man digging a
hole in the ground may be less competent than a man not in the hole
to perceive that presently the earth is going to cave in. As a matter
of fact, old maids, for example, have been known to bring up children
very well indeed, for the reason, possibly, that nothing is more
detrimental to successful authority over children than relationship to
them. All experience shows that the scientific, the abstract management
of children is more successful, in the average, than the traditional
parental method. This scientific method, I need not say, is not less
kindly than the other; it actually is more kindly. Witness the absolute
triumph of kindergartens--”
“Now, Professor,” I interposed, foreseeing the spectacle of Froebel
and Plato moving down arm-in-arm between the Professor’s periods,
“understand me--”
“A very difficult thing at times,” she murmured.
“Understand me--I am speaking now with my eye on the American child.”
“And _that_,” twinkled the Professor, “requires some dexterity.”
[Illustration]
“The American child,” I pursued, “is accused by many of threatening
our destruction, and if the American view of rearing children is
wrong or requires modification, this radical suggestion of Mr. Spencer,
looking to greater rather than less liberty in making terms with the
instincts of children, becomes a matter for serious concern. If the
American idea has stood for anything it is more sugar--that is to say,
yielding something to the instinct, the personality of the child. I
think we have gone a long way with it. Our children are becoming very
self-possessed. Sometimes I have qualms. Take the American girl child--”
[Illustration]
“A vast subject,” commented the Professor.
“The American girl child is getting a good deal of sugar--figuratively.
The question comes, Is it good for her? Is her freedom, her undomestic
training, her intellectual development, to the advantage of the race?
I believe with Mr. Ruskin that you can’t make a girl lovely unless you
make her happy. But how can we expect her to know what will make her
happy? Aren’t you afraid, Professor, that she is becoming a trifle
frivolous? Of course you yourself are a living contradiction--”
“Don’t try to deceive me,” warned the Professor. “I perceive in what
you say, not the doubts of an incipient cynic, but the remorse of a
doting and indulgent man. Most really typical American men are in
the same situation. They are wondering if they haven’t overdone it,
and, being too busy to find out for themselves, are eager for outside
judgment, upon which they may act, _de jure_. The vice of the
American man is his indulgence of the American girl. The foreigner
commiseratingly thinks that the American girl demands this indulgence.
The American man in his secret soul knows that he has pampered her for
his own pleasure, and because, to a busy man, pampering is easier than
regulating.”
“Yes,” I complained, “in the new paradise Adam is always to blame.”
“No,” protested the Professor, “not always; just humanly often.
And don’t think that you have invented this modern anxiety for the
welfare of girl children. Before and since ‘L’Éducation des Filles,’
they all have been ‘harping on my daughter.’ Women have been even
more despairing than men. Hannah More thought that ‘the education
of the present race of females’ was ‘not very favorable to domestic
happiness.’ Mrs. Stowe thought ‘the race of strong, hearty, graceful
girls’ was daily decreasing, and that in its stead was coming ‘the
fragile, easily fatigued, languid girls of the modern age, drilled in
book learning and ignorant in common things.’ Now that sort of thing
has been going on since our race stopped speaking with the arboreal
branch of the family. There is perpetual opportunity for a treatise
on ‘The Antiquity of New Traits.’ We are apt to think that we of this
era have invented the idea of educating girls, but civilized children
always have been educated early in something. Nowadays it is in
science. In our colonial days it was in piety. Miss Repplier, who
has a most relishable antipathy for prigs, in fiction and in life,
reminds us of Cotton Mather’s son, who ‘made a most edifying end in
praise and prayer at the age of two years and seven months,’ and of
Phoebe Bartlett, who was ‘ostentatiously converted at four.’ You are
not sorry to be rid of all that, are you?”
[Illustration]
“No,” I assented, “most assuredly I am not. It is pretty hard to find
the Juvenile Prig on this soil nowadays outside of the most inhuman
‘books for the young.’ And we all are glad of it. You may remember the
passage in the Chesterfield letters in which the father writes to the
son: ‘To-morrow, if I am not mistaken, you will attain your ninth year;
so that for the future I shall treat you as a _youth_. You must
now commence a different course of life, a different course of studies.
No more levity; childish toys and playthings must be thrown aside, and
your mind directed to serious objects. What was not unbecoming of a
child would be disgraceful of a youth.’ We certainly have outgrown that
view of things, and the American youngster comes nearer being without
hypocrisy than any product of civilization that I ever have studied.
But what have we in place of the piety and affectation? What is the
working result of so much independence? Are not the American girl
children, as well as the boys, a trifle irreverent?”
[Illustration]
“Yes, I know,” admitted the Professor, “the American child often
seems a shade too unawed. Balzac says somewhere that modesty is a
relative virtue--there is ‘that of twenty years, that of thirty
years, and that of forty years.’ Our ancestors believed in a severe,
hypocritical modesty for the young, trusting that they would get over
it. They did worse than that when they asked youth to anticipate the
hypocrisies of age. The same elegant person whom you have just quoted
once wrote to that same son: ‘Having mentioned laughing, I want most
particularly to warn you against it; and I could heartily wish that you
may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live.’
Although Chesterfield insisted that he was ‘neither of a melancholy
or cynical disposition,’ he was proud to be able to say to his boy
‘Since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard
me laugh.’ The next time you feel inclined to say mean things about
the Puritans remember that declaration by the Earl. Now, the American
seems to me not only to look at children differently, but to look at
life differently, and any new traits in the American child probably
represent one fact as much as the other. The American idea--I say
idea, but I mean the American habit; we explain our habits and call
the explanation a theory--merely obliterates age discriminations.
The American child is simply the diminutive American. The American
girl is her mother writ small. I don’t think that she is a whit more
independent or irreverent than her mother.”
[Illustration]
“You don’t mean to say, Professor, that a child should not, for
instance, be taught to keep a proper silence in company.”
“Not an absolute silence. A child either has a right to be in a
company or it has not. If it is in the company it has a right to be
articulate like the other members of the company. If it is a sensible
child it will listen to its elders, not because they are its elders
but because they are its betters, because they know more, are more
competent to speak. If it is not sensible it will be made to suffer
for its foolishness, just as older members of the company are made to
suffer. From my observation, children naturally brought up take their
reasonable place very naturally in company.”
“My fear is, Professor, that your naturalistic method overlooks
much of what we have become accustomed to think when we speak of
‘breeding.’ Now, children, even American children, do not acquire
this instinctively. Breeding includes restraint, externally applied
restraint--I don’t mean applied with a slipper or a rattan, though
restraint to have a really fine catholicity should, in my opinion,
include these symbols--but restraint inculcated by a wise, or at least
a wiser, authority. I believe sincerely that we have, in the past,
tried to bend the twig too far. But the beneficial results of guiding
twigs has been, I think, indisputably proved. Taking away too many
guides and supports must have its dangers. I think of these things
when I see the unhampered American girl of to-day. She is a lovely
spectacle. Yet I sometimes wonder, in a trite and old-fashioned way,
if her sort of training or absence of training is going to make her a
woman who will know how to manage a household and children. I can see
clearly enough that she is going to know how to manage a husband; but
the house--and the children--”
The Professor was musing. “Your anxiety makes me think of the early
criticisms of the kindergarten. ‘What!’ they used to exclaim, ‘a mob
of unmanageable brats and no ferule?’ Yet it is so. Your misgivings
overlook, I think, the latitudes of training, the obligations of
breeding. The American seems to me to be guiding his children as he
guides his civic affairs, not by brute force but by giving and taking.
If his child is born with the right to the pursuit of happiness, he
believes in starting the pursuit early. I suppose that children in the
United States have greater liberty than children in any other country.
The conferring of liberty has its dangers, and those who confer it
cannot expect to escape the obligations that go with the gift. It has
cost the American some annoyance to confer liberty and privileges on
grown-up folks from various quarters. If he decides--and he does so
quite reasonably I think--to include his children, he is bound to stand
with the emancipated.”
“Professor,” I said, “your words are soothing. They are alluringly
optimistic. I don’t want to reform the American child. I like him--and
especially her--as at present conditioned. I believe that the
irreverence is largely a seeming irreverence--an irreverence toward
traditions rather than toward people and principles; which simply is
saying what we should say of grown-up Americans. And I believe that in
any case the boy will knock his way out somehow. But the girl--I am not
doubting her; I am not believing that she is so petted a darling as
Paul Bourget, for instance, seems to think she is. I am not questioning
the intrinsic charm of her style, the piquing prophecies of her mind,
the perfection of her beauty, the delight of her companionship; I am
wondering whether this immediately agreeable sort of product is going
to meet the requirements of life as it is opening up to us in this
land, if--”
“Well,” swung in the Professor, “if you were going to have a worry, it
is a pity you couldn’t have had a new one--the new ones keep us busy
enough. You are very trite this time. You sound like a reformer--”
“Heaven forbid!” I cried.
“--and a reformer nowadays has a passion for beginning on the
children. Please don’t. Some of these reforming women remind me of
the advertisement in the London paper: ‘Bulldog for sale. Will eat
anything. Very fond of children.’ These reforming women will reform
anything--and they are very fond of children.”
“It is particularly the American girl,” I went on, “who is illustrating
the modern yearning to skip intervals, to ignore the ordinary processes
of time. She is like Horace Walpole, who found that the deliberation
with which trees grow was ‘extremely inconvenient to his natural
impatience.’ It doesn’t seem to make any difference how rigidly her
‘coming out’ time is fixed, she is getting to be a woman before her
time. Mark me, Professor, she knows too much, she--”
“A strictly masculine anxiety, sir.”
“--she knows too much, to the exclusion of some other things she
doesn’t know.”
[Illustration]
“Now _don’t_ mention the kitchen,” cried the Professor, “I am
dreadfully tired of that.”
“No, Professor, her general cleverness always seems to me to make the
kitchen anxiety needless to a great extent. I mean that in knowing so
much and assuming so much the American girl child may be missing some
of that sweetness that for her lies in a more old-fashioned girlhood.
As a kind of unbent twig she is losing some of the more dependent
happiness belonging to her and not grudged to her. Mind you, Professor,
if a crime has been committed, I am accessory--”
“I began with that assumption,” remarked the Professor.
“--and I am hoping that there has been no crime, that the unbent twig
is growing all right on its own account, that our spoiled daughters,
weary of privilege, may be longing to serve, that if her modesty is
not expressed in meek eyes ‘full of wonder,’ her lofty glance is not,
Hermes-like, given to lying. Whatever the future may have in store,
she at least is what she seems to be. Her sentiments may sometimes be
irreverent, but they are her own. Perhaps the reason she seems more of
an individual than the archetypal girl is, as you have suggested, that
we have stripped her of the hypocrisy by which she pretended not to be
a unit but only the mute shadow of a unit.”
“O, you will come around!” chuckled the Professor.
“‘Come around,’ Professor? You mean sink back into the Slough of
Idolatry. I feel it in my bones that in spite of a gleam of intelligent
interrogation as to the wisdom of pampering the American girl, I am
going to keep right on--”
“You mean, if you will be honest,” blurted the Professor, “that you
will keep on letting her alone as you do the boy child. That is all.
Own up. The most that you have done is cease the special repression of
the girl. For better or for worse the American has done simply that:
forget sex in rearing his young.”
[Illustration]
“Ah, Professor! when we forget sex are we not in danger of a costly
transgression? Are we not combating nature?”
“On the contrary, my friend, you are ceasing to combat nature. There
is nothing nature is more definitely certain to do than to look out
for sex on her own account. Is not all of creation trying to teach us
this lesson? Is not all of creation trying to teach us the folly and
the futility of meddling? Let nature alone. She knows her business. Sex
duality is universal. No amount of sitting up nights will help you to
think out a way of successfully interfering.”
I looked at the Professor. She is very much a woman. She suggested
a type that had been “let alone.” She is not a freak. Both her body
and her mind are well dressed, and she is good to look upon. To look
upon her sometimes fills me with a certain misgiving. But it is not a
misgiving for her.
“And yet,” it came to me to say, though not precisely in rebuke, “there
is such a thing as human humility.”
[Illustration]
“Humility?” The Professor looked over at me with affected scorn. “Then
illustrate it, please. I cannot see the humility of interference. The
American does not repress his daughter. You admit that you like the
result. Why wrinkle your brow in contemplation of the future? Why not
believe that what seems to be true is true, that the American girl
flourishes agreeably in her freedom? Give her the natural privileges
bestowed elsewhere throughout creation. Let her _grow_. She is
not like Jupiter, without seasons. And you must take one of her seasons
at a time.”
“Professor,” I said solemnly, “you remember Artemis?”
“Yes,” she returned with equal solemnity, “and I remember the daughters
of Pandareas.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
III
A CENTURY’S RUN
[Illustration]
We are a very young nation, yet we have a past. In popular acceptance
we have little to live down, which should be a comfort. Just at present
there is a tendency to be disrespectful toward the past, to smile at
ancestral pretension, to humanize the Fathers of the Republic, to sneer
at the straw and bones on the floor of King Arthur’s dining hall, to
uncover the littleness of the ancient giants, to question the beauty
of the ancient heroines. Probably this needed to be done, particularly
in defence of the abused Present, which always hitherto has had a hard
time of it. “Every age since the golden,” says George Eliot, “may be
made more or less prosaic by minds that attend only to the vulgar and
sordid elements, of which there are always an abundance, even in
Greece and Italy, the favorite realms of the respective optimists.” The
author of “Romola” was willing not to have lived sooner, and to possess
even Athenian life “solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity.”
But even the past, sinfully boastful and complacent as it appears, has
rights which we must make some show of respecting, and we need not
too effusively applaud the present. Possibly the one good excuse for
finding out and confessing the whole truth about the past, is the need
to show, at whatever cost, that neither all of our vices nor all of our
virtues are entirely new. The passion for discovery is so strong that
some one always is ready to prove that the most trite and fundamental
of traits are absolutely novel, and the same passion appears in the
unction with which the pretension is ridiculed and overthrown. I talked
one day with a distinguished American historian, who confessed that the
supreme difficulty for the commentator on human character and events
was that arising from a tendency to “think disproportionately well of
facts which he himself has discovered.” Admit this to be a human trait
and we have a sufficient explanation of the ardor of the discoverer.
Now, no man can regard as insignificant any fact concerning woman,
disproportionate as the importance of the fact may be made to appear
in comparison with other facts concerning her, so that we have no
greater difficulty in appreciating the noisy announcement of the New
Woman than in appreciating the only less audible contention that there
is no such appearance. Happily the foolish discussion is over. Only
a few catch-words now remind us of the hopeless debate. Of course,
Eve was the only new woman. She alone was incontrovertibly new; and
to seek by trick of title to invest with newness any woman who came
after her, was a frivolous and degenerate conspiracy. Not, indeed, that
newness is intrinsically a defect, though heraldry and afternoon teas
may be arranged upon that assumption; but in effect it is belittling,
destructive of certain benefits of the doubt, insulting to the woman of
the past and skeptical as to the woman of the present.