question, was probably in no wise recognized. Why, then, should they
have recognized the human quality of their visitors?" Our satirical
reader was silent, and we went on. "There is something very droll in all
that. We suppose you have often been vexed, or even outraged, by the
ingratitude of the waiter whom you had given a handsome tip, over and
above the extortionate charge of the house, and who gathered up your
quarter or half-dollar and slipped it into his pocket without a word, or
even an inarticulate murmur, of thanks?"
"Often. Outraged is no word for it."
"Yes," we assented, feeling our way delicately. "Has it ever happened
that in the exceptional case where the waiter has said, 'Thank you very
much,' or the like, you have responded with a cordial, 'You're welcome,'
or, 'Not at all'?"
"Certainly not."
"Why not?"
"Because--because--those are terms of politeness between--"
Our friend hesitated, and we interrogatively supplied the word, "Equals?
There are always difficulties between unequals. But try this, some day,
and see what a real gratitude you will get from the waiter. It isn't
infallible, but the chances are he will feel that you have treated him
like a man, and will do or say something to show his feeling: he will
give a twitch to your under-coat when he has helped you on with your
top-coat, which will almost pull you over. We have even tried saying
'You are welcome' to a beggar. It's astonishing how they like it.
By-the-way, have you the habit of looking at your waiter when he comes
to take your order; or do you let him stand facing you, without giving
him a glance above the lower button of his poor, greasy waistcoat?"
"No, the theory is that he is part of the mechanism of the
establishment."
"That is the theory. But it has its inconveniences. We ourselves used to
act upon it, but often, when we found him long in bringing our order, we
were at a loss which waiter to ask whether it would be ready some time
during the evening; and occasionally we have blown up the wrong waiter,
who did not fail to bring us to shame for our error."
"They do look so confoundedly alike," our visitor said, thoughtfully.
"We others look confoundedly alike to them, no doubt. If they studied us
as little as we study them, if they ignored us as contemptuously as we
do them, upon the theory that we, too, are part of the mechanism, the
next man would be as likely as we to get our dinner."
"They are paid to study us," our visitor urged.
"Ah, _paid_! The intercourse of unequals is a commercial transaction,
but when the inferiors propose to make it purely so the superiors
object: they want something to boot, something thrown in, some show of
respect, some appearance of gratitude. Perhaps those dairymaids did not
consider that they were paid to stand up when their employer and the
visiting celebrity came into the milk-room, and so, unless they were
civilly recognized--we don't say they weren't in this case--they thought
they would do some of the ignoring, too. It is surprising how much the
superiors think they ought to get for their money from the inferiors in
that commercial transaction. For instance, they think they buy the right
to call their inferiors by their first names, but they don't think they
sell a similar right with regard to themselves. They call them Mary and
John, but they would be surprised and hurt if the butler and waitress
addressed them as Mary and John. Yet there is no _reason_ for their
surprise. Do you remember in that entrancing and edifying comedy of
'Arms and the Man'--Mr. Bernard Shaw's very best, as we think--the wild
Bulgarian maid calls the daughter of the house by her Christian name?
'But you mustn't do that,' the mother of the house instructs her. 'Why
not?' the girl demands. '_She calls me Louka._'"
"Capital!" our friend agreed. "But, of course, Shaw doesn't mean it."
"You never can tell whether he means a thing or not. We think he meant
in this case, as Ibsen means in all cases, that you shall look where you
stand."
Our satirist seemed to have lost something of his gayety. "Aren't you
taking the matter a little too seriously?"
"Perhaps. But we thought you wanted us to be more serious than we were
about addressing letters properly. This is the larger-sized morality,
the real No. 11 sort, and you don't like it, though you said you
expected it of us."
"Oh, but I do like it, though just at present I hadn't expected it. But
if you're in earnest you must admit that the lower classes with us are
abominably rude. Now, I have the fancy--perhaps from living on the
Continent a good deal in early life, where I formed the habit--of saying
good-morning to the maid or the butler when I come down. But they never
seem to like it, and I can't get a good-morning back unless I dig it out
of them. I don't want them to treat me as a superior; I only ask to be
treated as an equal."
"We have heard something like that before, but we doubt it. What you
really want is to have your condescension recognized; they _feel_ that,
if they don't _know_ it. Besides, their manners have been formed by
people who don't ask good-morning from them; they are so used to being
treated as if they were not there that they cannot realize they _are_
there. We have heard city people complain of the wane of civility among
country people when they went to them in the summer to get the good of
their country air. They say that the natives no longer salute them in
meeting, but we never heard that this happened when they first saluted
the natives. Try passing the time of day with the next farmer you meet
on a load of wood, and you will find that the old-fashioned civility is
still to be had for the asking. But it won't be offered without the
asking; the American who thinks from your dress and address that you
don't regard him as an equal will not treat you as one at the risk of a
snub; and he is right. As for domestics--or servants, as we insolently
call them--their manners are formed on their masters', and are often
very bad. But they are not always bad. We, too, have had that fancy of
yours for saying good-morning when we come down; it doesn't always work,
but it oftener works than not. A friend of ours has tried some such
civility at others' houses: at his host's house when the door was opened
to him, arriving for dinner, and he was gloomily offered a tiny envelope
with the name of the lady he was to take out. At first it surprised, but
when it was imagined to be well meant it was apparently liked; in
extreme cases it led to note of the weather; the second or third time at
the same house it established something that would have passed, with the
hopeful spectator, for a human relation. Of course, you can't carry this
sort of thing too far. You can be kind, but you must not give the notion
that you do not know your place."
"Ah! You draw the line," our friend exulted. "I thought so. But where?"
"At the point where you might have the impression that you respected
butlers, when you merely loved your fellow-men. You see the difference?"
"But isn't loving your fellow-men enough? Why should you respect
butlers?"
"To be sure. But come to think of it, why shouldn't you? What is it in
domestic employ that degrades, that makes us stigmatize it as 'service'?
As soon as you get out-of-doors the case changes. You must often have
seen ladies fearfully snubbed by their coachmen; and as for chauffeurs,
who may kill you or somebody else at any moment, the mental attitude of
the average automobilaire toward them must be one of abject deference.
But there have been some really heroic, some almost seraphic, efforts to
readjust the terms of a relation that seems to have something
essentially odious in it. In the old times, the times of the simple life
now passed forever, when the daughter of one family 'lived out' in
another, she ate with the family and shared alike with them. She was
their help, but she became their hindrance when she insisted upon the
primitive custom after 'waiting at table' had passed the stage when the
dishes were all set down, and the commensals 'did their own stretching.'
Heroes and seraphs did their utmost to sweeten and soften the situation,
but the unkind tendency could not be stayed. The daughter of the
neighbor who 'lived out' became 'the hired girl,' and then she became
the waitress, especially when she was of neighbors beyond seas; and then
the game was up. Those who thought humanely of the predicament and
wished to live humanely in it tried one thing and tried another. That
great soul of H.D.L., one of the noblest and wisest of our economic
reformers, now gone to the account which any might envy him, had a usage
which he practised with all guests who came to his table. Before they
sat down he or his wife said, looking at the maid who was to serve the
dinner, 'This is our friend, Miss Murphy'; and then the guests were
obliged in some sort to join the host and hostess in recognizing the
human quality of the attendant. It was going rather far, but we never
heard that any harm came of it. Some thought it rather odd, but most
people thought it rather nice."
"And you advocate the general adoption of such a custom?" our friend
asked, getting back to the sarcasm of his opening note. "Suppose a
larger dinner, a fashionable dinner, with half a dozen men waiters?
That sort of thing might do at the table of a reformer, which only the
more advanced were invited to; but it wouldn't work with the average
retarded society woman or clubman."
"What good thing works with _them_?" we retorted, spiritedly. "But no,
the custom would not be readily adopted even among enlightened thinkers.
We do not insist upon it; the men and the maids might object; they might
not like knowing the kind of people who are sometimes asked to quite
good houses. To be sure, they are not obliged to recognize them out of
the house."
"But what," our friend asked, "has all this got to do with the question
of 'the decent respect' due from domestics, as you prefer to call them,
to their employers?"
"As in that case of the dairymaids which we began with? But why was any
show of respect due from them? Was it nominated in the bond that for
their four or five dollars a week they were to stand up when their
'mistress' and her 'company' entered the room? Why, in fine, should any
human being respect another, seeing what human beings generally are? We
may love one another, but _respect_! No, those maids might, and probably
did, love their mistress; but they felt that they could show their love
as well sitting down as standing up. They would not stand up to show
their love for one another."
"Then you think there is some love lost between the master and man or
mistress and maid nowadays," our beaten antagonist feebly sneered.
"The masters and mistresses may not, but the men and maids may, have
whole treasures of affection ready to lavish at the first sign of a
desire for it; they do not say so, for they are not very articulate. In
the mean time the masters and mistresses want more than they have paid
for. They want honor as well as obedience, respect as well as love, the
sort of thing that money used to buy when it was worth more than it is
now. Well, they won't get it. They will get it less and less as time
goes on. Whatever the good new times may bring, they won't bring back
the hypocritical servility of the good old times. They--"
We looked round for our visiting reader, but he had faded back into the
millions of readers whom we are always addressing in print.
VII
UNIMPORTANCE OF WOMEN IN REPUBLICS
A visitor of the Easy Chair who seemed to have no conception of his
frequency, and who was able to supply from his imagination the welcome
which his host did not always hurry to offer him, found a place for
himself on the window-sill among the mistaken MSS. sent in the delusion
that the editor of the Chair was the editor of the magazine.
"I have got a subject for you," he said.
"Have you ever heard," we retorted, "of carrying coals to Newcastle?
What made you think we wanted a subject?"
"Merely that perfunctory air of so many of your disquisitions. I should
think you would feel the want yourself. Your readers all feel it for
you."
"Well, we can tell you," we said, "that there could be no greater
mistake. We are turning away subjects from these premises every day.
They come here, hat in hand, from morning till night, asking to be
treated; and after dark they form a Topic Line at our door, begging for
the merest pittance of a notice, for the slightest allusion, for the
most cursory mention. Do you know that there are at least two hundred
thousand subjects in this town out of a job now? If you have got a
subject, you had better take it to the country press; the New York
magazines and reviews are overstocked with them; the newspapers,
morning and evening, are simply inundated with subjects; subjects are
turned down every Sunday in the pulpits; they cannot get standing-room
in the theatres. Why, we have just this moment dismissed a subject of
the first interest. Have you heard how at a late suffrage meeting one
lady friend of votes for women declared herself an admirer of monarchies
because they always gave women more recognition, more honor, than
republics?"
"No, I haven't," our visitor said.
"Well, it happened," we affirmed. "But every nook and cranny of our
brain was so full of subjects that we simply could not give this a
moment's consideration, and we see that all the other editors in New
York were obliged to turn the cold shoulder to it, though they must have
felt, as we did, that it was of prime importance."
From a position of lounging ease our visitor sat up, and began to nurse
one of his knees between his clasped hands. "But if," he asked, "you had
been able to consider the subject, what should you have said?"
"There are a great many ways of considering a subject like that," we
replied. "We might have taken the serious attitude, and inquired how far
the female mind, through the increasing number of Anglo-American
marriages in our international high life, has become honeycombed with
monarchism. We might have held that the inevitable effect of such
marriages was to undermine the republican ideal at the very source of
the commonwealth's existence, and by corrupting the heart of American
motherhood must have weakened the fibre of our future citizenship to the
point of supinely accepting any usurpation that promised ranks and
titles and the splendor of court life."
"Wouldn't you have been rather mixing your metaphors?" our visitor
asked, with an air of having followed us over a difficult country.
"In a cause like that, no patriotic publicist would have minded mixing
his metaphors. He would have felt that the great thing was to keep his
motives pure; and in treating such a subject our motives would have
remained the purest, whatever became of our metaphors. At the same time
this would not have prevented our doing justice to the position taken by
that friend of votes for women. We should have frankly acknowledged that
there was a great deal to be said for it, and that republics had
hitherto been remiss in not officially acknowledging the social primacy
of woman, but, in fact, distinctly inviting her to a back seat in public
affairs. We should then have appealed to our thoughtful readers to give
the matter their most earnest attention, and with the conservatism of
all serious inquirers we should have urged them to beware of bestowing
the suffrage on a class of the community disposed so boldly to own its
love of the splendors of the state. Would it be sage, would it be safe,
to indulge with democratic equality a sex which already had its eyes on
the flattering inequality of monarchy? Perhaps at this point we should
digress a little and mention Montesquieu, whose delightful _Spirit of
Laws_ we have lately been reading. We should remind the reader, who
would like to think he had read him too, how Montesquieu distinguishes
between the principles on which the three sorts of government are
founded: civic virtue being the base of a republic, honor the ruling
motive in the subjects of a monarchy, and fear the dominant passion in
the slaves of a despotism. Then we should ask whether men were prepared
to intrust the reins of government to women when they had received this
timely intimation that women were more eager to arrive splendidly than
to bring the car of state in safety to the goal. How long would it be,
we should poignantly demand, before in passing from the love of civic
virtue to the ambition of honor, we should sink in the dread of power?"
Our visitor was apparently not so deeply impressed by the treatment of
the subject here outlined as we had been intending and expecting he
should be. He asked, after a moment, "Don't you think that would be
rather a heavy-handed way of dealing with the matter?"
"Oh," we returned, "we have light methods of treating the weightiest
questions. There is the semi-ironical vein, for instance, which you must
have noticed a good deal in us, and perhaps it would be better suited to
the occasion."
"Yes?" our visitor suggested.
"Yes," we repeated. "In that vein we should question at the start
whether any such praise of monarchy had been spoken, and then we should
suppose it had, and begin playfully to consider what the honors and
distinctions were that women had enjoyed under monarchy. We should make
a merit at the start of throwing up the sponge for republics. We should
own they had never done the statesmanlike qualities of women justice. We
should glance, but always a little mockingly, at the position of woman
in the Greek republics, and contrast, greatly to the republican
disadvantage, her place in the democracy of Athens with that she held in
the monarchy of Sparta. We should touch upon the fact that the Athenian
women were not only not in politics, but were not even in society,
except a class which could be only fugitively mentioned, and we should
freely admit that the Spartan women were the heroic inspiration of the
men in all the virtues of patriotism at home as well as in the field. We
should recognize the sort of middle station women held in the Roman
republic, where they were not shut up in the almost Oriental seclusion
of Athenian wives, nor invited to a share in competitive athletics like
the Spartan daughters. We should note that if a Spartan mother had the
habit of bidding her son return with his shield or on it, a Roman mother
expressed a finer sense of her importance in the state when she
intimated that it was enough for her to be the parent of the Gracchi.
But we should not insist upon our point, which, after all, would not
prove that the decorative quality of women in public life was recognized
in Rome as it always has been in monarchies, and we should recur to the
fact that this was the point which had been made against all republics.
Coming down to the Italian republics, we should have to own that Venice,
with her ducal figurehead, had practically a court at which women shone
as they do in monarchies; while in Florence, till the Medici established
themselves in sovereign rule, women played scarcely a greater part than
in Athens. It was only with the Medici that we began to hear of such
distinguished ladies as Bianca Cappello; and in the long, commonplace
annals of the Swiss commonwealth we should be able to recall no female
name that lent lustre to any epoch. We should contrast this poverty with
the riches of the French monarchy, adorned with the memories of Agnes
Sorel, of Diane de Poitiers, of Madame de Montespan, of Madame de
Pompadour, following one another in brilliant succession, and sharing
not only the glory but the authority of the line of princes whose
affections they ruled. Of course, we should have to use an ironical
gravity in concealing their real quality and the character of the courts
where they flourished; and in comparing the womanless obscurity of the
English Commonwealth with the feminine effulgence of the Restoration,
we should seek a greater effect in our true aim by concealing the name
and nature of the ladies who illustrated the court of Charles II."
"And what would your true aim be?" our visitor pressed, with an unseemly
eagerness which we chose to snub by ignoring it.
"As for the position of women in despotisms," we continued, "we should
confess that it seemed to be as ignobly subordinate as that of women in
republics. They were scarcely more conspicuous than the Citizenesses who
succeeded in the twilight of the One and Indivisible the marquises and
comtesses and duchesses of the Ancien Regime, unless they happened, as
they sometimes did, to be the head of the state. Without going back to
the semi-mythical Semiramis, we should glance at the characters of
Cleopatra and certain Byzantine usurpresses, and with a look askance at
the two empresses of Russia, should arrive at her late imperial majesty
of China. The poor, bad Isabella of Spain would concern us no more than
the great, good Victoria of England, for they were the heads of
monarchies and not of despotisms; but we should subtly insinuate that
the reigns of female sovereigns were nowhere adorned by ladies of the
distinction so common as hardly to be distinction in the annals of kings
and emperors. What famous beauty embellished the court of Elizabeth or
either Mary? Even Anne's Mrs. Masham was not a shining personality, and
her Sarah of Marlborough was only a brilliant shrew.
"At this point we should digress a little, but we should pursue our
inquiry in the same satirical tenor. We hope we are not of those
moralists who assume a merit in denouncing the international marriages
which have brought our women, some to think tolerantly and some to
think favorably of a monarchy as affording greater scope for their
social genius. But we should ask, with the mock-seriousness befitting
such a psychological study, how it was that, while American girls
married baronets and viscounts and earls and dukes, almost none, if any,
of their brothers married the sisters or daughters of such noblemen. It
could not be that they were not equally rich and therefore equally
acceptable, and could it be that they made it a matter of conscience not
to marry ladies of title? Were our men, then, more patriotic than our
women? Were men naturally more republican than women?
"This question would bring us to the pass where we should more or less
drop the mocking mask. We should picture a state of things in which we
had actually arrived at a monarchy of our own, with a real sovereign and
a nobility and a court, and the rest of the tradition. With a sudden
severity we should ask where, since they could not all be of the highest
rank, our women would consent to strike the procession of precedence?
How, with their inborn and inbred notions of the deference due their
sex, with that pride of womanhood which our republican chivalry has
cherished in them, they would like, when they went to court, to stand,
for hours perhaps, while a strong young man, or a fat old man, or a
robust man in the prime of life, remained seated in the midst of them?
Would it flatter their hopes of distinction to find the worst scenes of
trolley-car or subway transit repeated at the highest social function in
the land, with not even a hanging-strap to support their weariness,
their weakness, or, if we must say it, their declining years? Would the
glory of being part of a spectacle testifying in our time to the
meanness and rudeness of the past be a compensation for the aching legs
and breaking backs under the trailing robes and the nodding plumes of a
court dress?"
"That would be a telling stroke," our visitor said, "but wouldn't it be
a stroke retold? It doesn't seem to me very new."
"No matter," we said. "The question is not what a thing is, but how it
is done. You asked how we should treat a given subject, and we have
answered."
"And is that all you could make of it?"