THE INDIAN AND AFFECTATION
Most people of the white race may learn from the Indian in the matter
of affectation. Few of us are simple and natural in our social manners.
My own family often joke me, when, in answering the telephone, I
respond in what they call my “dressy tone.” The other day a lady,
whose husband is a college professor, mistook me for a distinguished
eastern psychologist whose surname happens to be the same as mine.
Until she discovered her mistake she “minced and mouthed” in a most
ludicrous fashion (how I wish she could have seen herself as I saw
her!) merely because she thought I was a prominent man in the field
wherein her husband was a more humble member. The criticism on my own
“dressy tone” is a perfectly just one. I find myself, often, “putting
on style” because I want to appear “my best.” After due consideration
I have decided to confess that--like most people--I have a variety of
“celluloid smiles” which unconsciously I put on or off as occasion
requires. We are not simple, not natural in our relationships one
with another. We feel that we must “make an impression,” that we
must “appear well.” The result is we are unnatural, affected, often
deceptive, and many a time disagreeable. Affectation in speech and
manner is always a sign of mental meanness,--of what is commonly called
vulgarity, and is never to be commended but is always to be condemned.
[Illustration: APACHE INDIAN WHO REFUSED TO “PUT ON STYLE” TO PLEASE
THE WHITE MAN.]
On the other hand, if the President of the United States were to
visit a tribe of uncontaminated Indians, as, for instance, the Navahos,
they would treat him in exactly the same manner as they would the
humblest citizen; except, of course, that if the president asked for a
pow-wow they would give him one, and treat his words with respectful
deference. But there would be no affectation in their dealings with
him, no putting on of airs or style. With frank, open directness, with
the respect they show, as a rule, to each other, and no more, they
would listen to all he had to say and give hearty and manly response of
approval or disapproval. They have no “company manners,” no changes of
voice which are used according to the social status of the listener.
There are no snobs among them. “A man’s a man for a’ that,” no matter
whether he wears an old army overcoat and a top hat or merely a tight
skin and his gee-string.
The white race, too, is fearfully affected in its pretense at knowing
more than it can know. We are all ashamed to say, “I don’t know!” I
believe this applies more truthfully to women than to men. Since the
era of the woman’s club, the gentle sex has been wild to accumulate
knowledge, and sadly too often, it is content to _appear_ to have the
knowledge rather than appear ignorant. One has but to look over the
programs of a score or a hundred women’s clubs, as I have recently
done, to see proof of this in the vast range many of them take _in a
single season_. They crowd into an hour’s or two hours’ session what
no person living can get a reasonable grasp of in less than from three
months to a year of fairly consistent and persistent study. They jump
from “The Romantic School of Music,” one week to “The Effect of the
Renaissance upon Gothic Art,” the next, and the third week finds them
swallowing a concentrated pill on “The Poets of the Victorian Era,”
while on the fourth they completely master all that can be learned of
“The Franciscan Mission Epoch in California and Its Influence upon the
Indians.”
Yet let it not be thought that I am not a believer in education for
women, women’s clubs, and the like. I believe in everything that
_really helps_. And if these clubs would compel mental exercise enough
to give a fair grasp of _one subject a year_, they would be doing work
of incalculable benefit. But this smattering of knowledge, this thin
spreading out of scraps of information, feed no one’s mind, and the
pretense that comes from an assumed knowledge does the mind and soul of
the pretender more harm than a dozen clubs can eradicate in a lifetime.
Hence, let us become simple-minded, as the Indians. They “don’t know,”
and they know they don’t know, and they are willing to say so.
There is another affectation to which I must refer. We Americans
pretend to be democratic, yet we have a caste of wealth that is more
disgusting, degrading, and demoralizing than the Hindoo castes, or the
social scale of European aristocracy. We “kow tow” to an English lord
as if he were a little god, and we bow and scrape and mince our words
when we come in contact with the _nouveau riche_ of our own land, just
as if they were made of different material from ourselves. The space
given in our newspapers to the most trivial doings of Alice Roosevelt,
both before and after she married Congressman Longworth; the recital
of the actions of the “society” few,--the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds,
Carnegies, Harrimans, Fishes, and the rest,--are proofs of our affected
snobbism. I have not yet attained to the mental serenity and calm
philosophy of the Indian, but I am seeking it, where I shall judge all
men and women not by their exterior circumstances of wealth, position,
dress, or birth, but by inherent character, perfection of body, force
of mind, and beauty of soul.