have remarked that the wearing of them has developed new expressions
of countenance among women. When they wrinkle,--I mean the veils,--the
wearer has a way of pursing her lips to push the silken gauze free from
the end of her nose, having accomplished which, her fingers gently
pull the thing into subjection from the lower hem. At certain seasons
and under certain conditions the habit is strangely general, until
you might think that woman, like the novelist in his last chapter, is
always drawing a veil. The more expert can pull out the wrinkles by
supplementing the pout of the lips with an indescribable wrinkling
of the nose, and without calling assistance from the hand. I do not
suppose that girls are educated to do this in any particular way, yet
the uniformity of the habit is little less than astonishing.
Speaking of uniformity of habit, I have observed the same thing about
her back hair. The gesture of the fingers with which a woman readjusts
a hairpin, or, perhaps, simply ascertains that it is doing its duty, is
wonderfully similar among all women. Yet the gesture may to a singular
degree be a reflection of her personal style, and in that latitude for
purely personal grace you sometimes are brought to the compensatory
fact that in sitting behind the hat you also are sitting behind the
hairpins.
[Illustration]
This crowning glory of her hair! How it has fluttered in song and
story! How it has shimmered here in comedy and there in tragedy!
How it has dowered and decked and framed her, and puzzled us by its
mysterious fickleness of color, now this shade, now that, on the same
saucy, shapely head! How quaint a picture she can make for us when
she masks it in powder and carries us back to the days of Copley or
Watteau! How it has served to remind us, in some forbidden discovery
of the crimping pin or the curl-paper, that from the beginning woman’s
pleasures and her conquests have not been unmixed with pain!
[Illustration]
How much fashion owes to hair and hair to fashion! How inexhaustible
are the harmonies of line of which it is capable! How fascinating, by
association, are the combs, and patillas and wimples and ferronières
which have caressed and curbed it! We no longer dye it blue as the
Greeks did, though we still, as the Greeks did also, produce blondes
at pleasure. Far be it from this page to express any preference as
between blonde and brunette. If, as we have been told, all of the poets
from Homer to Apuleius doted on blonde hair; if Aphrodite was blonde,
and Milton’s Eve; if Petrarch loved his blonde Laura (with crimps)
and Boccaccio delighted in tresses of gold, who shall attach any more
final significance to this than to the fact that woman at his moment is
whimsically dressing her hair like Botticelli’s Grace?
Reason does not meet these matters. “I am highly pleased,” wrote
Addison, “with the coiffure now in fashion.” That is the ideal attitude
of mind, a point of view above reproach. No man really is normal who
does not think that “the coiffure now in fashion,” yes, and all else in
fashion that expresses the invincible instinct of woman, is peculiarly
and especially likable.
“Professor!” I cried, in a moment of fresh and profound conviction,
“I am assured that it is a measure of sanity in a man that he shall
like woman in whatever she wears. She can confound our most precious
theories by doing as she pleases in the matter of dress, for the effect
is always right because she has produced it. It all is _her_. You
might as well find fault with the shade of crimson in the feathers on
the bosom of a robin as to find fault with the color of her hat or
gloves. Some combinations make us wince when we first see them, and in
the weakness of that moment we even may entertain a doubt as to the
safety of the proprieties; but we come to excuse the doubted effects,
and end by putting them into the very grammar of color. I have detected
a score of instances in which woman, or fashion speaking for her,
has met and turned the judgment of art. I have a theory that certain
painter prejudices have simply been demolished by the instinct of
woman.”
The Professor was reading an exciting book on “The Evolution of the
Vertebrata,” and I knew it, but she was quite patient, and said
quietly, “Those are not the only prejudices that have been demolished
by the instinct of woman.”
“True,” I admitted, curious, yet not disposed to challenge enumeration.
“Do you know,” I went on, “that your comment brings up an interesting
question as to the effect upon woman herself of a pampered instinct.
Will not the reckless gratification of instinct, charming as its
effects may be, tend in time to differentiate her unfavorably? Though
you meet vertebrata with your reason, when you turn your instincts
loose upon millinery are you not vitiating--”
“_Will_ you stop!” expostulated the Professor, “before both
instinct and reason co-operate in boxing your ears? Prattle about a
woman’s instinct is a man’s way of dodging admission of woman’s subtler
sense. If I actually had the time I should like to impress upon you the
fact that dress is a department of the fine arts; that it has a logic
and a language, principles, rules, functions, and a future. But that
is another matter. Man is hampered by absurd prejudices as to clothes,
especially as to the clothes of women. Our Concord philosopher remarked
that the consciousness of being well dressed imparts a peace and
confidence which even religion scarcely can bestow. Beneath the fact of
this dependence lie emotions and impulses to which women yield frankly,
but to which men turn a hypocritical squint. The candor of woman toward
her clothes instincts does her good. A free, natural love of clothes as
clothes is a sign of health in a woman.”
[Illustration]
“Professor, if I did not know how fearfully and wonderfully it was
made, and how unpromising for the purpose, I should say that you were
talking through your hat.”
The Professor rewarded me with her choicest twinkle. “Well,” she said,
“I sha’n’t be able to laugh in my sleeve much longer; fashion is making
it tighter every day!”
“Can you not see,” I went on, “that the tightness or looseness of a
sleeve, for example, must have some direct effect upon the mental
attitude of a woman? Are not these constant changes destructive of
intellectual repose and progress? If dress is a language, how can you
escape a resulting confusion in this instability?”
“My dear sir, that constant change of which you speak is not an
instability, but a consistent and symmetrical ebb and flow.”
“It may be pure curiosity, Professor, but even if Rosalind did not have
‘a doublet and hose in her disposition,’ it seems to me that we well
may wonder how far the current bloomer affects the mind of the current
young woman. It cannot be possible that so momentous and revolutionary
a condition as the bloomer shall be without effect upon the mind of
woman--and not merely upon the women who wear them, but upon the whole
sex. It has been said that not only the physical structure but the
character of men have been modified by the fact that men persistently
avoid bagging their trousers at the knees. Will not the divided skirt
divide woman’s attention--”
“As for bloomers,” said the Professor, “and all related forms of dual
garmentature, I am going to lecture about them before the Zenith
Club, and, if you are very good, when my paper is quite completed I
shall read it to you. Meanwhile, I may remark that the bloomer is not
‘current’ at all, save, perhaps, in a modified and semi-visible way in
partnership with an abbreviated skirt,--but this is anticipating.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
VII
CHANCE AND CHOICE
[Illustration]
A distinguished general and admirable gentleman once was said to have
lost the Presidency because he called the tariff a “local issue.” It
might be difficult for us to discipline Coleridge for calling love
a “local anguish.” Yet the plausibility of the statement should not
defend the culprit. Love is, actually, not at all local, particularly
when it is an anguish. It is immensely pervasive, an international
issue, an inter-planetary, a universal issue. The light of love may
be hidden under the bushel of modesty, yet its undaunted X-rays will
penetrate the farthermost spaces.
But it is too late, or too early, in other words wholly unfashionable,
to write about love, and I certainly should not have committed the
offence of the foregoing paragraph had it not been for an entirely
orderly and even timely thought as to the possibility that love, like
any other malady or manifestation, might have a purely national flavor,
not merely in its outward symptoms, but in its inherent quality. That
is to say, I had wondered in what way, if in any way, the American
girl’s definition of love would be distinctive. If I had asked the
Professor, she would, had she consented to take me seriously, have
described love as “the sum and sublimation of all possible inter-human
attachments,” or something of that sort. She would have been abstract,
for woman, however personal she may incline to be by virtue of her sex
and method, loves the abstract in definition for so much of reservation
as it may leave to her. There is safety and breathing room in a large
definition. Doubtless we never shall be able to get at Miss America’s
sentiments except in a purely empirical way, and if I were writing
a treatise instead of setting down a few notes, I should have felt
an obligation to study out the question by observing critically the
conduct of the American girl in the processes of courtship.
The difficulty of such observation always must lie in the fact that
the most interested man in any specific instance himself is wholly
incapable of making report if he would. A man who could be analytical
in any circumstances which included a settlement of his own fate, would
be fit for every treason. He might go through a variety of mental
motions which to him, at the time, passed for the convolutions of pure
reason. He might, and doubtless often has, fancied himself as studying
her, as penetrating the mask of her femininity, as dispassionately
dissecting her sentiments. Indeed, every prudent man must at some
stage weigh, with whatever sobriety may be possible to him, the chances
of what she will say; and this must always include some estimate of
what she is thinking.
The relationship between what she is thinking and what she will say
is one of the most complex in nature, and I fancy that in our climate
and environment its fundamental complexity has been increased. I know
that it is the habit of science to assume that the reason woman seems
more contradictory than man is not that she is dishonest, but that she
is impulsive. Impulse naturally is far less uniform than reason. “They
change their opinions,” complains Heine, “as often as they change their
dress,” a sentiment which proves conclusively that Heine had credulous
intervals. A woman who always had the same opinion would instinctively
realize the stupidity of that condition, as she would the condition
of always being seen in the same dress; and if she didn’t have a new
opinion she might do with the old opinion as with the old dress, turn
or cut it over. You cannot say from the notorious inaccuracy of a
woman’s gesture when she presumes to place her hand on her heart, that
she has not a heart, that she is unaware of its precise location, or
that it is not in the right place.
If a man means less than he says, and a woman always means more, we may
see at a glance that it is easier to subtract than to add. But this is
not the chief difficulty. A man, if I may be pardoned the dogmatism,
always speaks in the original, while woman must be translated, and
it is vastly easier in any case, to translate his hyperbole than
her meiosis. When woman was simpler, she had less of this quality.
When she said no, and simply meant yes, man learned to translate and
understand her. Even a man could work out by the least subtle of
reasoning that when she said “No!” most fiercely she really was saying,
“_Idiot!_ why don’t you _make_ me say yes!” But after a time,
perhaps because she suspected, for good reason, man’s discovery of the
cypher, because she saw that it was not enough to turn the alphabet
upside down, woman began to qualify rather than to invert, and man
was no longer in possession of the key. The whole arithmetic of the
calculation was infinitely lifted, and rose from the rule of three into
the higher realms of pure mathematics. If she _always_ called him
back he would know just what to do. If a little absence _always_
made her heart grow fonder, the process was capable of exact and
circumstantial procedure. But no longer is it so. She may, indeed,
still mean yes when she says no. She reserves her constitutional
rights. But to read her language now, to filch from her swift talk the
true meaning, to trace in the deceptively deep stream of her feminine
philosophy the faintly shining pebbles of pure fact, is a function
calling out the highest that is in man.
[Illustration]
In Miss America, then, we have this quality at its best, or its worst,
as you may view the matter; and the quality in her is coupled with
others that belong to her, and perhaps to her only. The degree of
independence which she has achieved has had a natural effect upon her
relations to courtship. This independence has not merely accentuated
the elusiveness which belongs to her as a woman. The quality of being
hard to get is not new in woman, or in any degree original in any
race. Ranging from the conditions in which barbaric woman is knocked
down by the strongest bidder, to those in which she is knocked down
to the highest, there is a uniform, because instinctive, outward
habit of indifference or aloofness in the sex. But Miss America’s
independence affects the whole question of her choice and the method
of her choice. And, committed as she is, by virtue of being a woman,
to a vast and fateful chance, she has, more certainly than any other
woman in the world, a choice. For good or ill, and in whatever degree
social station and social habit may modify the practice, she has an
actual participation in the forming of the matrimonial partnership. The
world has seen marriage by capture, by service, by purchase, by social
convenience, by free and natural choice. The experiment of marriage by
free choice has received in our own country its fullest trial. Marriage
by social convenience and by purchase still survive, even with us, and
there are many among us who think that marriage for love may not be
final as a national trait, and that we will discover that the compact
of marriage, being in the interest of society and actually under the
government of society should be made directly in conformity with the
convenience of society. Meanwhile, the trait is under scrutiny, the
practice is under trial.
[Illustration]
Marriage for love, is marriage in which woman is the arbiter, so
that Miss America is carrying out, side by side with her brother’s
experiment in democracy, an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment
in social practice. She believes, and reasonably, that Plato prophesied
this system in his conservatively worded remark that “people must be
acquainted with those into whose families and with whom they marry
and are given in marriage.” She believes that if marriage is to be
“chiefly by accident and the grace of nature,” it shall be left to her
to illustrate the grace of nature. And most men who are candid with
themselves know that while man may have the nominal initiative, she is
in charge of the situation. There is a German saying that a man cannot
be too careful in choosing his parents. It is equally true that a man
cannot be too careful in letting the right woman pick him out.
[Illustration]
If I have been able to grasp it, the American girl’s idea is that
marriage is best when it is a culminated friendship, that is to
say, when it includes friendship. This is a new idea, of course,
revolutionary in more than may at first appear. Indeed, we might more
correctly call the American idea, marriage for friendship. Balzac
has said a very severe thing of love that does not include “an
indissoluble friendship”; but it cannot be denied that we often are
perplexed to see that in this business the greater does not always
seem to be including the less. If the American girl shall succeed in
definitely incorporating friendship into the essentials of marriage
she will have accomplished a great triumph. “As to the value of other
things,” says Cicero, “most men differ; concerning friendship all have
the same opinion.”
If she shall succeed in making friendship an essential of marriage,
Miss America will, indisputably, have founded the American practice of
a pre-matrimonial acquaintance. We shall go on believing that when we
meet her with a “Fate-can-not-harm-me-I-am-engaged” look, she cannot,
as often happens in other civilizations, be in ignorance of his name.
And we can see at a glance that by insisting that she shall _know_
the man she is to marry, Miss America is assuming an intimate and
personal dominion over courtship. She not only is assuming a power and
a responsibility, but confessing the delicate truth of her individual
jurisdiction. It will make no difference what formula she uses for “You
may speak to father.” The euphemisms behind which she now can hide
herself are as diaphanous as her finest veil.
Yet, is there any to doubt her mastery of the situation she has
invented? Is there any to doubt that in her new situation she has
a new power? I know what has been said of the women who have gone
before. “And this I set down as an absolute truth,” said Thackeray,
“that a woman with fair opportunities and without an absolute hump may
marry _whom she likes_.” And I do not mean, and perhaps should
specifically protest that I do not mean, that Miss America is a whit
more assertive in her selection than the women of whom Thackeray has
chosen to say this much. But there is a sense in which Miss America, by
virtue not only of peculiar privileges, but of peculiar endowments, is
giving a new significance to courtship. Her attitude of mind is not to
be confused with mere independence. We have many antecedent examples
of independence. “At all events,” wrote Mrs. Carlyle to her insistent
suitor, “I will marry no one else. That is all the promise I can and
will make.” She thought that an agreement to marry a certain person at
a certain time was simply absurd. Miss America’s independence is the
product of conditions which have produced a sex attitude of mind as
well as an individual attitude of mind.
It has seemed as if the development of this sentiment, and the
realization of responsibility, were making the American girl more
conservative in certain ways, and that she was, in the matter of
early marriages for example, drawing nearer to the older systems.
Sentimentally, early marriages are a good thing. Perhaps they are
practically also. Martin Luther and other wise commentators have
pointedly advised them. But the century has scarcely offered approval.
Stubbs, in his “Anatomy of Abuses,” complained bitterly that it
should be possible for “every sawcy boy of xiiij., xvi., or xx yeres
of age to catch a woman and marie her without any fear of God at all.”
Early marriages were a source of great complaint in our colonial days.
Probably the caution of our young women is responsible for the fact,
now frequently quoted, that early marriages are less frequent. At the
first sign of a new caution there is always the alarmist who jumps to
the conclusion that he is to be put off until the time De Quincey set
for the amusement of taking home a printing press,--“the twilight of
his dotage”; and it will be said of this or that section when some one
is in the mood to say it, as Heine said of France in 1837, that “girls
do not fall in love in this country.”
[Illustration]
Some characteristics of the era may not be attributed to anything that
is new in our system. Flirtation, for example, is a very old vice.
Yet, as every calling has a conscience of its own, I like to think
that flirtation has been harshly painted in some respects. If it does
not show specific modifications in our longitudes, we must conclude
that it is a necessary evil. At any rate we know from more than one
biologist that flirting is not solely a human trait. This in a measure
disperses and softens the responsibility. And one must not be hasty in
marking flirtation. There is the seeming and the real, like true and
false croup. Many women have been accused of flirting who were never
more serious in their lives, just as we have known them to be cruelly
accused of sincerity at a time when their whimsicality should have been
patent to the least intelligent of observers.
In an era when letter-writing is said to be dying out, it is not
surprising that love-letters should come under suspicion. Indeed,
there have been many temptations to cynicism. The law courts have been
invoked to decide whether love-letters belong to the sender or to the
receiver; nice questions have grown out of misunderstandings as to
proposals of marriage. It is hinted that men are to become revoltingly
crafty as to things put upon paper, and that the young lady of a not
remote future will receive her lover’s notes moist and blurred from the
embrace of a copying book.
The general decrease in the quantity of letter-writing due, among
other reasons, to the telephone, the trolley and railroads, and the
increased rapidity of life in general, undoubtedly has influenced the
mere bulk of sentimental correspondence, though concrete instances are
conflicting. One young man of my acquaintance writes to his sweetheart
every day. Another, who has been engaged for some months, confessed to
writing to the young woman (she lives in another city) once a week;
“and do you know,” he said, “I have a deuce of a time to find anything
to say!”
Whatever tendency the American girl herself may be willing to foster
or accept, it always will be true that the gift for writing the
right letter to the right person is one of the most potent known to
civilization. There are genuine, warm-hearted charming-mannered men who
can write only a brutally dull letter, and there are reprobates who
can fill a letter with the aroma of paradise. In an affair beginning
with letters the reprobate must have the advantage. Indeed, I knew a
girl who went on believing in the author of certain letters after the
most disenchanting honeymoon that ever woman endured, after society had
looked askance at her, after the towering lie of those letters had cast
a blighting shadow across her life.
[Illustration: Thoughts]
One pretty and pleasant little woman in Kentucky told me that when she
was engaged she sometimes got two letters a day. “And when we were
married I missed those letters so!” And this was indubitably a happy
marriage. I knew in just what sort of place those letters would be
kept, and just how they would be tied up, and could fancy just how she
would look in the dim of a rainy day when she brought them forth and
spread them out--by the cradle.
[Illustration: Thoughts]
Who can tell what passes in the heart of a woman? Who can read her as
she reads her letters over there in the corner of the summer hotel
verandah? Who can say what she is thinking there in the shadow of the
birch-tree picking off the petals? “He loves me--he loves me not”--no,
surely something more modern. What could be more piquing than that
partnership--nature and a woman? If she chooses to take another member
into the firm, that is her affair. If she has a tryst, who shall have
the meanness to wish any more or less than that he may not keep her
waiting an unseemly time--or that she may not have followed a habit she
has, and have gone absently to the wrong place? Yet she may have chosen
to walk alone and to let the summer pass and the hectic colors of the
dying season flaunt themselves in her face without giving a sign. Who
can say what passes in the mind of a woman? When she opens the book of
her own heart, and turns to the last page first to see how the thing
comes out, is she not puzzled sometimes to find all the print running
backward? Who can say, if a fairy came out of the wood, what manner of
choice she would ask of that fairy, what fortune she would consider
sweetest, what form of man she would ask for her Prince Charming? How
small the chance that she knows what she wants, or that if she did
know she would regard it as safe and symmetrical not to ask for the
opposite?