than any other cities on this continent is adapted to the coming woman,
and that the ‘unprotected female’ is going out of fashion in those
places. The new idea (and why isn’t it a good idea?) is that a woman
is not necessarily the ward and appendage of some man who must guard
her from the attacks of other men, and also from the follies of her
own feeble brain, but that she is an individual of equal dignity and
responsibility with the man and able to protect herself from whatever
dangers may assail her--not with her fists, to be sure, but by her own
dignity, and, if need be, by appeal to the officers of the law.”
“Strong minded!” suggested I.
“Well, you don’t think it’s nice to be weak minded,” retorted my
friend, with a laugh; and so we parted.
Now, is his theory correct? Do the women of a few of our cities already
feel the wave of progress that is slowly rolling around the world to
this extent? If so, is it not a foreshadowing of what is to come?
There has been a great deal of talk in the last few years of women’s
rights and a great deal of discussion as to what those rights consist
in. But there is no solvent of knotty questions of a social nature like
time and also experiment.
Woman’s right to work was pretty easily conceded, for, as a
general thing, whatever a woman undertakes to do she does well and
intelligently, especially if she is spurred on by a determination to
show that she can do it as well as a man.
Moreover, women have always consented to work for less wages than men
can command, and it is only very lately that some fair-minded and
logical employers have practically assented to the proposition that the
same amount and quality of work should command the same amount of wage,
let it be done by a man or a woman. Then comes the right of standing
up in the cars, a right which men themselves invented and conferred
upon the mothers and wives of other men, although their own mothers and
wives, when subjected to similar discipline from other men, probably
explained to their own mankind how injurious they found it.
And the right of franchise is being gradually torn and dragged from the
unwilling hand of man, and I for one am very doubtful if it will not
prove a very perplexing white elephant when it has been fully captured.
But what concerns us just now is woman’s right to protect herself, and
it seems by my friend’s report that this right is on trial in some of
our cities pretty extensively.
Now, it seems to me that this is a very legitimate and sensible kind of
right, and also one which will develop by its exercise the very best
and most valuable traits of the woman of the future. If she is to stand
for herself, instead of running behind her big brother at every alarm,
she must acquire, or rather practice, dignity, firmness, self-respect
and courage--not the courage of the prize-fighter, but of the monarch,
the queen, who feels that she is safe among her subjects by the simple
right of her queenhood.
Now let us get back to the pith of this little creed and consider
whether our girls do really need chaperons, or if the old colonial
custom of maids and matrons going whither they would, by sunlight and
moonlight, in company with their brothers, their fathers, their cousins
or their uncles, as the case might be, or without them, just as it
happened, was not really nearer the proposed era of woman’s rights than
the world has been during the last half century. Of course, we all know
that in the beginning these United States, or rather the society of the
new nation, was by preference and choice opposed to the traditions of
the old.
Etiquette and formality reigned supreme at the courts of Versailles
and St. James, so let us despise etiquette and formality and be as
patriarchal and pastoral as possible. President Jefferson, I believe
it was, who complained of the cumbrous ceremonial of the White House,
and stripped the servants of the modest livery George Washington
had instituted, and when he gave a State dinner to the English
plenipotentiary and his wife, took some other lady to dinner.
But as the country grows in wealth and luxury, as Americans more
and more spend their holidays abroad and keenly observe the manners
of other people, a change has crept over the primeval simplicity.
Anglomania has succeeded to Anglophobia, and whether the White House
servants may be liveried or not, half the coachmen and grooms of New
York are, and the etiquette of visiting cards has been found worthy of
several elaborate treatises, showing how we may by these magic bits
of pasteboard pretend to those friendly visits which our grandmothers
honestly made to each other.
Along with the other importations of conventionality has come the
system of chaperonage, and it is as artificial as all the rest. The
original idea is good. A very young girl should go into society with
her mother, just as the parent bird, when the fledgling begins to try
its wings, accompanies its feeble flight, chirping encouragement and
showing how to guide the tremulous course and how to find the early
worm or the glittering grub. But so soon as the young bird has strength
and sense enough to fly alone, the mother goes about her more important
affairs, and leaves the daughter to make practical use of the lessons
she has learned.
But the conventional improvement upon this idea is that the young bird
never becomes a responsible bird with the right of self guidance, until
she is mated, and that the most venerable and proper and demure old
maid sparrow must never try to fly or to pick up that early worm unless
she is under the protection of some little, flirty, flighty hen, just
married to some jaunty little cock sparrow no older than herself.
I hope the simile is not insulting, but I declare I cannot help
thinking of it when I see a lady of uncertain age, who has ripened by
the experience of some score of seasons in society, entering the room
under convoy of a rosy, curly, fresh young bride, who was in her cradle
when the spinster was a _débutante_.
Now, this absurdity arises from a remnant of the old barbaric idea that
all women are fools and all men are brutes, for that is the core of the
old code of chivalry, of the institution by Arthur of the Knights of
the Round Table, and a great deal more of the pretty and the impossible
state of things people sometimes pretend that they would like to
reproduce.
What were the duties of the Knight of the Round Table? They were to
ride up and down the land rescuing the dames and damsels who were being
carried away by wicked knights, or who, being married to other wicked
knights, were being dragged about by their hair, turned out to starve
and otherwise maltreated. They were also to take and keep a vow of such
self control and decency of life as is now expected of every man, but
in that day was the exception and not at all the rule.
Well, under such a condition of affairs, chaperons for single women
became a necessity, for the married woman, however young and silly
herself, possessed a husband whose duty it would be to fight not only
for his wife, but the helpless creature under her and his protection.
If they went to ride in the green wood, he and his men-at-arms would
prevent the predatory knights, who always seemed to be prowling around,
from swooping down and carrying off the women, and if they went to
a ball at Camelot or some other fashionable resort, the fear of the
chaperon’s husband would prevent those open and insulting protestations
and proposals which apparently every man was ready to make, and every
woman perfectly helpless to resist.
But those noble days of chivalry are past, and the world has moved on
several degrees upon that enormous orbit which they tell us encircles
some unknown center around which our entire system revolves. Men have
learned to cultivate their brains and their pockets, instead of simply
their passions for murder and rapine. They are no longer content to be
simply the male animal of the genus homo. If they are still formidable
to the safety and honor of women, it is only when the woman courts the
danger and would not for the world have any Galahads and Percivals
interfering in her little amusements. And women are no longer fools,
nor babes, nor the helpless prey of her destroyer. She has as a sex
grown out of childhood into youth, and has developed an amount of
character and a wealth of promise that have fairly made the tradition
mongers and conservatives stand aghast and stammer in dismay: “Stop!
Stop! Where are you going?”
Does not it seem probable that this extraordinary growth and maturity
of womanhood is to make its mark upon society, as it has upon labor and
upon politics and upon public thought? If women are showing themselves
competent to earn their own living, to think their own thoughts and to
express them in literature and out, if they already largely govern the
school boards and are reaching out toward the helm of state, is it not
time that they should learn to protect themselves from insult and to
guide their own steps with discretion?
A young fellow going into society does not take his father along to
guard him from the snares and follies most young men are at least
tempted to. In fact, these dear boys would resent, with a very
formidable wrath, any suggestion that they could not take care of
themselves, and also of their sisters, if need be, nor indeed are they
loath to propose themselves as the guides, protectors and champions
of other men’s sisters, if not of their wives. But why is the boy
of twenty so much more responsible and trustworthy than the girl of
eighteen, and why, if one is to take care of the other, does not she
take care of him? for I think if the girl had been brought up with a
sense of her own responsibilities she would be the stronger of the two.
Do not suppose, however, that I am advocating the complete emancipation
of young girls from parental control. No, for I think nothing more
disagreeable than the independent and almost insulting tone adopted in
these days by a good many girls toward their fathers and mothers. No,
my idea is simply, let the girls be trained while still children to
such true and womanly self-respect and self-reliance that they would no
more misbehave themselves in society than their mothers would, and let
them as they grow older show their right to freedom by their moderation
and wisdom in using it.
But if some weak or ill-advised sister really needs a guardian in going
among people, let her at least select some one old enough to be her
mother, instead of a bride fresh from boarding school.
IX.
A PLEA FOR ARTIFICIALITIES.
“Pretty as a picture!” we often hear enthusiastic persons exclaim at
sight of a fair landscape or a beautiful face. The speaker’s genuine
appreciation then is evidently for pictures rather than for the actual
things which the pictures more or less truthfully represent, and his
compliment to nature is in consequence lamentably left-handed. But
nature can stand it well enough, and the sentiment underlying such
a spontaneous expression is very human and natural. There is indeed
almost invariably an instinctive justice behind social traditions
and popular prejudices. In this case the fact is that the picture
is a simplified adaptation of nature to the general comprehension.
In a successful picture much is made of the salient features which
pleasantly strike the eye, and everything else is eliminated, for the
sight, like the other senses, and like the heart itself, has its own
predilections and antipathies, which it subtly imposes upon the reason.
It is the discriminating selection and adjustment of these outward
affinities, then, that constitute the main function of art. And social
artificiality is simply art applied to ethics, to the minor morals and
manners of everyday life; hence the unanimous preference of mankind,
particularly women--of course, as the old phrase has it, mankind
embraces women--for the suave conventionalities of art over the crude
verities of nature. It was easy to see that Alphonse Karr had been a
philosopher before he turned florist when he said, “Few women love
flowers, but all are fond of bouquets.”
Flowers themselves are highly susceptible to the ameliorating
influences of artificiality. Compare the wild flowers with the
cultivated exotic or even with the favorites of the garden, and see
how splendidly nature acknowledges, with what richness of bloom and
incense of odor, the ministering attentions of art. How immeasurably
the exquisite Parma violet surpasses the modest dogtooth of the wood!
While that dainty wild rose, the eglantine, when called by some other
name--Jacqueminot, for example, with a fine pedigree of artificiality
behind it--really does smell far sweeter. This, of course, is no
disparagement to the dewy eglantine, which is charming in its native
wilds. All I claim is that the comparison certainly does not slight the
queenly Jacque.
So the rule runs all the way up to men and women. High bred is high
valued everywhere. War has repeatedly demonstrated that the city
man--he of the nervous tension and artificial life--has better soldier
stuff in him than the horny-handed patriot fresh from the plow.
Nature lays the foundation of all beauty, moral and physical, but she
does not bestow the _cachet_ of distinction. A Parisian _grande dame_
once said in my hearing to Mrs. C., a fair American who prided herself
upon that wondrous lily and rose complexion which the late Horace
Greeley bequeathed to his daughters: “But, my dear, you should use
powder. Not that you need it for beauty’s sake, or to make your skin
whiter--no!--but it softens the _éclat_ of color and takes away the
shine. All the difference between a dairymaid and a duchess!”
Civilized life at this present stage of the comedy is as full of
intricately interwoven artificialities as a bank note is of silken
threads and fibers. Paradoxically speaking, these assure its
genuineness. From the most trivial affectations of speech and personal
adornment to the awfulest concerns of life, death and the hereafter,
we progress through such a series of discoveries of things being not
at all what they seem that we may well ponder over Berkeley’s theory
of the unsubstantiality of the universe. Form and fact bear about the
same relation to each other as the lines in a perspective drawing do to
those of material objects.
Why, then, rail at artificialities, or vanities, as they are called in
the case of most women, or hypocrisies or foibles, in the case of some
men? For people, particularly writing and lecturing people, of both
sexes, do rail at them constantly, though unprofitably enough, unless
in a pecuniary sense. Most of these take their cue from Carlyle, of
whom R. H. Hutton significantly remarks in a recent essay that he was
forever fulminating in righteous wrath against shams, but never became
enthusiastic over any truth.
After all, the main motive of the thousand and one amiable little
deceptions practiced by everybody except the “unco guid” is to please
us--to please, or at least to avoid displeasing, the onlooking world.
Is the wearing of a wig more immoral than a public display of nude
cranium in the front parquet of a theater? Who will maintain that a
stayless, shapeless woman receives or deserves more deference in public
than one who has tastefully made good the deficiencies of nature,
while at the same time accentuating her really good points? Can I in
my heart care less for the worldling who breezily inquires after my
health here than for the saintly person who preaches to me about my
hereafter? This reminds me of a little damsel I know who is always
making delightful “breaks,” and who once inquired, “Mother, what part
of heaven do people go to who are good but not agreeable?”
Keeping up appearances is surely an excusable affectation. It is on
the side of setting a good example. What good men conceal is not their
virtues, while bad men pay virtue the compliment at least of disguising
themselves in her outward semblance. Assume a virtue, if you have it
not. Doubtless it is best, on the whole, that a public career should so
frequently show of the person who has lived it, like his epitaph, after
death,
“Not what he was, but what he should have been.”
The gulf between the apparent and the actual is not so impossibly
wide. To be something and to appear it are indeed two quite different
matters, yet in our time the latter is often the stepping stone to the
former.
Love itself is a gorgeous fabric of artiflcialities. Some philosophers
have undertaken to prove to us that modern romantic love is entirely a
product of latter day æsthetics, developed from the fantastic chivalry
of the middle ages. Certainly the passion portrayed in the epics and
odes of antiquity, though heroic enough, is far grosser, more sinister
and more material than the exquisite sentiment, the “love that is
passion’s essence,” in Rousseau, for example, or the fine, fervid
exaltation of Tennyson. No; love in our era is, as compared with the
classic days of old, far more delicate, far more spiritual and far
more artificial. To-day the adorer beholds the adored one encircled
with such a nimbus of ideality as can only be approached by a somewhat
kindred perfection; hence a studious concealment of defects, a sudden
bourgeoning out of qualities, a general putting on of grace. And, on
the other side, the adored one is probably making equally strenuous
efforts to appear in a favorable, even though artificial, light. Thus
we see artificiality in its noblest aspect--that of a striving after
the ideal.
But are not such ideals predestined to disillusion and disappointment?
Disillusion, no doubt. But why be ungrateful? Why expect too much?
The _dénouement_ of a happy dream is necessarily the awakening, yet I
fancy all will admit that in such case ’tis better to have so dreamed
and wakened than never to have dreamed at all, or than to have had bad
dreams. Love is the dream, marriage the waking. Quite pertinently does
Byron ask.
“Think you if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life?”
Of course not. There was something palpably artificial about Petrarch’s
well-sung devotion to the lovely Provençale. But the world is agreed
that this immortal fantasy was worth quite as much as the solid reality
possessed by Laura’s husband, M. de Sade, who was a commonplace and
rather morose bourgeois of Avignon.
What is duty? That which we exact of others, wittily answered Dumas
_fils_. Well, one of the things we are most certain to exact of others
is good manners. Good manners, like charity, should begin at home. We
must set a good example in this respect, especially we women, whose
prerogative of administering the unwritten laws in polite society and
in matters of taste I believe even our most churlish critics have not
as yet challenged. The five talents of woman, according to Ruskin, are
those which enable her, first, to please people; second, to feed them
in dainty ways; third, to clothe them; fourth, to keep them orderly,
and fifth, to teach them. Pray, and how is she to fulfil all or any of
these duties if you deny her the right to exercise her supreme talent,
the one which inspires all the rest, her talent for artificiality,
for the arts of affectation and dissimulation? Virtue itself fails
to please unless it be clothed in gentleness and grace, and, as Miss
Edgeworth has told us, even vice loses half its evil by losing all its
grossness.
On the masculine side take the Duc de Morny’s succinct illustration of
politeness. “A polite person,” he declared, “is one who listens with
interest to things he knows all about when they are discussed by a
person who knows nothing about them.” Then the politeness of the man of
the world, which in truth stands for our modern chivalry, is obviously
incompatible with outspoken unartificiality.
In the matter of hospitality this question touches us very nearly. Did
you ever feel your heart warm to the winning effusion of a Southern
welcome and half unconsciously contrast it with the glacial “sincerity”
of the reception you got when you first presented yourself as a
stranger somewhere in England, for instance? Not but that the English
hospitality was true-hearted and genuine, but, alas! it was masked in
that stony British formality which, as a matter of fact, is quite as
preposterous an affectation as the superficial extravagance with which
all Anglo-Saxons reproach all Latins. If you desire to appreciate them
both, to enjoy your visit for all it is worth, you must never dream of
taking either one of them literally at his word.
Let us deprecate so far as we can the conventional tirades against
conventionality, against artificiality. If by force of repetition
they end by almost persuading us against our own conscience, we can
take refuge in the sterling maxim of Amiel that human kindness is the
first principle of tact, and respect for others’ feelings the primary
condition of _savoir vivre_.
X.
VICES AND FOIBLES.
“While the barrooms are full of men the churches are full of women,”
said a shrewd observer in one of the daily prints lately. His statement
was a broad one, but after all conveys a truth of which women may
perhaps be too proud.
They don’t frequent barrooms and similar resorts, to be sure, but then
one must remember they don’t want to. They do go to church a good deal,
but they take pleasure in doing it. Virtue and vice are, after all,
comparative terms, and the temperament of the individual comes in to
modify most decisions.
On one of the occasions when I helped to swell the congregation of
women at church, I heard what seemed to me a most sensible and rational
theory propounded by the preacher. He was talking of the judgment, and
he said that the Judge was not going, like an earthly magistrate, to
apply an iron law to every case alike, but to consider each culprit’s
temperament, opportunities and environment. That seems to me a plan
that, if it could be applied in mundane courts of so-called justice,
would be productive of far happier results than can now be obtained.
Men, for instance, would not be so severely judged for frequenting
barrooms as women would, and a fretful, suspicious, “nagging” woman
would not be punished for her flights of temper as a man would be for
similar conduct.
Each sex has its own class of faults, and doubtless the temptation
to those faults is far stronger in the class which has a sort of
hereditary right to them than in any other. They differ essentially,
these faults of men and women do, and very often they clash all the
more on account of these differences. Man’s wrong tendencies run into
vices more or less coarse and degrading, while woman’s tend rather to
foibles and faults more or less narrow and contemptible.
In this matter of barrooms, for instance, almost every man thrown into
business and political relations with his fellow-men, or who mingles
freely with other men of various classes, finds himself very often
invited, almost compelled, to drink something with them, and I suppose
two-thirds of the men in America are in the habit of doing so. Just why
people should invite each other to drink as a sign of good fellowship,
or honest intentions, or forgiveness, or amity, is rather a puzzle,
especially to the female mind. Why is the process of deglutition a
specially social one? Why don’t they invite each other to wash their
hands together, or comb their hair, or blow their noses--in fact, any
of the familiar functions men perform all the time, just as they drink
when they are thirsty and eat when they are hungry?
However, not to spend time in theorizing, we grant the fact that men
have a habit of drinking together, and downtown they resort to barrooms
for that purpose. I am not writing a temperance lecture and do not
say there is any wrong in doing this, but I do say that drunkenness
is a vice, and a very disgusting one, and that a habitual drunkard is
not a fit or indeed a possible companion for any woman. The vice is
one natural to him as a man in our present condition of civilization,
especially in great cities, and perhaps a perfectly just and omniscient
judge would not condemn him for it half so severely as the woman does
who is compelled to suffer from the effects of a vice which is no
temptation to her and which she cannot understand.