exhausted. We could go on with this indefinitely. We could point out
that the trouble was, with us, not too much democracy, but too little;
that women's civic equality with men was perhaps the next step, and not
the social inequality among persons of both sexes. Without feeling that
it affected our position, we would acknowledge that there was now
greater justice for women in a monarchy like Great Britain than in a
republic like the United States; with shame we would acknowledge it; but
we would never admit that it was so because of the monarchism of the
first or the republicanism of the last. We should finally be very
earnest with this phase of our subject, and we should urge our fair
readers to realize that citizenship was a duty as well as a right. We
should ask them before accepting the suffrage to consider its
responsibilities and to study them in the self-sacrificing attitude of
their husbands and fathers, or the brothers of one another, toward the
state. We should make them observe that the actual citizen was not
immediately concerned with the pomps and glories of public life; that
parties and constituencies were not made up of one's fellow-aristocrats,
but were mostly composed of plebeians very jealous of any show of
distinction, and that, in spite of the displeasures of political
association with them, there was no present disposition in American men
to escape to monarchy from them. We cannot, we should remind them, all
be of good family; that takes time, or has taken it; and without good
family the chances of social eminence, or even prominence, are small at
courts. Distinction is more evenly distributed in a democracy like ours;
everybody has a chance at it. To be sure, it is not the shining honor
bestowed by kings, but when we remember how often the royal hand needs
washing we must feel that the honor from it may have the shimmer of
putrescence. This is, of course, the extreme view of the case; and the
condition of the royal hand is seldom scrutinized by those who receive
or those who witness the honor bestowed. But the honor won from one's
fellow-citizens is something worth having, though it is not expressed in
a ribbon or a title. Such honor, it seems probable, will soon be the
reward of civic virtue in women as well as men, and we hope women will
not misprize it. The great end to be achieved for them by the suffrage
is self-government, but with this goes the government of others, and
that is very pleasant. The head of our state may be a woman, chosen at
no far-distant election; and though it now seems droll to think of a
woman being president, it will come in due time to seem no more so than
for a woman to be a queen or an empress. At any rate, we must habituate
our minds to the idea; we must realize it with the hope it implies that
no woman will then care socially to outshine her sister; at the most she
will be emulous of her in civic virtue, the peculiar grace and glory of
republics. We understand that this is already the case in New Zealand
and Colorado and Wyoming. It is too soon, perhaps, to look for the
effect of suffrage on the female character in Denmark; it may be mixed,
because there the case is complicated by the existence of a king, which
may contaminate that civic virtue by the honor which is the moving
principle in a monarchy. And now," we turned lightly to our visitor,
"what is the topic you wish us to treat?"
"Oh," he said, rising, "you have put it quite out of my head; I've been
so absorbed in what you were saying. But may I ask just where in your
treatment of the theme your irony ends?"
"Where yours begins," we neatly responded.
VIII
HAVING JUST GOT HOME
The air of having just got home from Europe was very evident in the
friend who came to interview himself with us the other day. It was not,
of course, so distinguishing as it would have been in an age of less
transatlantic travel, but still, as we say, it was evident, and it lent
him a superiority which he could not wholly conceal. His superiority, so
involuntary, would, if he had wished to dissemble, have affirmed itself
in the English cut of his clothes and in the habit of his top-hat, which
was so newly from a London shop as not yet to have lost the whiteness of
its sweat-band. But his difference from ourselves appeared most in a
certain consciousness of novel impressions, which presently escaped from
him in the critical tone of his remarks.
"Well," we said, with our accustomed subtlety, "how do you find your
fellow-savages on returning to them after a three months' absence?"
"Don't ask me yet," he answered, laying his hat down on a pile of
rejected MSS., delicately, so as not to dim the lustre of its nap. "I am
trying to get used to them, and I have no doubt I shall succeed in time.
But I would rather not be hurried in my opinions."
"You find some relief from the summer's accumulation of sky-scrapers
amid the aching void of our manners?" we suggested.
"Oh, the fresh sky-scrapers are not so bad. You won't find the English
objecting to them half so much as some of our own fellows. But you are
all right about the aching void of manners. That is truly the bottomless
pit with us."
"You think we get worse?"
"I don't say that, exactly. How could we?"
"It might be difficult."
"I will tell you what," he said, after a moment's muse. "There does not
seem to be so much an increase of bad manners, or no manners, as a
diffusion. The foreigners who come to us in hordes, but tolerably civil
hordes, soon catch the native unmannerliness, and are as rude as the
best of us, especially the younger generations. The older people,
Italians, Czechs, Poles, Greeks, Assyrians, or whatever nationalities
now compose those hordes, remain somewhat in the tradition of their home
civility; but their children, their grandchildren, pick up our
impoliteness with the first words of our language, or our slang, which
they make their adoptive mother-tongue long before they realize that it
is slang. When they do realize it, they still like it better than
language, and as no manners are easier than manners, they prefer the
impoliteness they find waiting them here. I have no doubt that their
morals improve; we have morals and to spare. They learn to carry pistols
instead of knives; they shoot instead of stabbing."
"Have you been attacked with any particular type of revolver since your
return?" we inquired, caustically.
"I have been careful not to give offence."
"Then why are you so severe upon your fellow-savages, especially the
minors of foreign extraction?"
"I was giving the instances which I supposed I was asked for; and I am
only saying that I have found our manners merely worse quantitatively,
or in the proportion of our increasing population. But this prompt
succession of the new Americans to the heritage of the old Americans is
truly grievous. They must so soon outnumber us, three to one, ten to
one, twenty, fifty, and they must multiply our incivilities in
geometrical ratio. At Boston, where I landed--"
"Oh, you landed at Boston!" we exclaimed, as if this accounted for
everything; but we were really only trying to gain time. "If you had
landed at New York, do you think your sensibilities would have suffered
in the same degree?" We added, inconsequently enough, "We always
supposed that Boston was exemplary in the matters you are complaining
of."
"And when you interrupted me, with a want of breeding which is no doubt
national rather than individual, I was going on to say that I found much
alleviation from a source whose abundant sweetness I had forgotten. I
moan the sort of caressing irony which has come to be the most
characteristic expression of our native kindliness. There can be no
doubt of our kindliness. Whatever we Americans of the old race-suicidal
stock are not, we are kind; and I think that our expression of our most
national mood has acquired a fineness, a delicacy, with our people of
all degrees, unknown to any other irony in the world. Do you remember
_The House with the Green Shutters_--I can never think of the book
without a pang of personal grief for the too-early death of the
author--how the bitter, ironical temper of the Scotch villagers is
realized? Well, our ironical temper is just the antithesis of that. It
is all sweetness, but it is of the same origin as that of those terrible
villagers: it comes from that perfect, that familiar understanding,
that penetrating reciprocal intelligence, of people who have lived
intimately in one another's lives, as people in small communities do. We
are a small community thrown up large, as they say of photographs; we
are not so much a nation as a family; we each of us know just what any
other, or all others, of us intend to the finest shade of meaning, by
the lightest hint."
"Ah!" we breathed, quite as if we were a character in a novel which had
inspired the author with a new phrase. "Now you are becoming
interesting. Should you mind giving a few instances?"
"Well, that is not so easy. But I may say that the friendly ironies
began for us as soon as we were out of the more single-minded keeping of
the ship's stewards, who had brought our hand-baggage ashore, and, after
extracting the last shilling of tip from us, had delivered us over to
the keeping of the customs officers. It began with the joking tone of
the inspectors, who surmised that we were not trying to smuggle a great
value into the country, and with their apologetic regrets for bothering
us to open so many trunks. They implied that it was all a piece of
burlesque, which we were bound mutually to carry out for the
gratification of a Government which enjoyed that kind of thing. They
indulged this whim so far as to lift out the trays, to let the
Government see that there was nothing dutiable underneath, where they
touched or lifted the contents with a mocking hand, and at times carried
the joke so far as to have some of the things removed. But they helped
put them back with a smile for the odd taste of the Government. I do not
suppose that an exasperating duty was ever so inexasperatingly
fulfilled."
"Aren't you rather straining to make out a case? We have heard of
travellers who had a very different experience."
"At New York, yes, where we are infected with the foreign singleness
more than at Boston. Perhaps a still livelier illustration of our
ironical temperament was given me once before when I brought some things
into Boston. There were some Swiss pewters, which the officers joined me
for a moment in trying to make out were more than two hundred years old;
but failing, jocosely levied thirty per cent. ad valorem on them; and
then in the same gay spirit taxed me twenty per cent. on a medallion of
myself done by an American sculptor, who had forgotten to verify an
invoice of it before the American consul at the port of shipment."
"It seems to us," we suggested, "that this was a piece of dead earnest."
"The fact was earnest," our friend maintained, "but the spirit in which
it was realized was that of a brotherly persuasion that I would see the
affair in its true light, as a joke that was on me. It was a joke that
cost me thirty dollars."
"Still, we fail to see the irony of the transaction."
"Possibly," our friend said, after a moment's muse, "I am letting my
sense of another incident color the general event too widely. But before
I come to that I wish to allege some proofs of the national irony which
I received on two occasions when landing in New York. On the first of
these occasions the commissioner who came aboard the steamer, to take
the sworn declaration of the passengers that they were not smugglers,
recognized my name as that of a well-known financier who had been abroad
for a much-needed rest, and personally welcomed me home in such terms
that I felt sure of complete exemption from the duties levied on others.
When we landed I found that this good friend had looked out for me to
the extent of getting me the first inspector, and he had guarded my
integrity to the extent of committing me to a statement in severalty of
the things my family had bought abroad, so that I had to pay
twenty-eight dollars on my daughter's excess of the hundred dollars
allowed free, although my wife was bringing in only seventy-five
dollars' value, and I less than fifty."
"You mean that you had meant to lump the imports and escape the tax
altogether?" we asked.
"Something like that."
"And the officer's idea of caressing irony was to let you think you
could escape equally well by being perfectly candid?"
"Something like that."
"And what was the other occasion?"
"Oh, it was when I had a letter to the customs officer, and he said it
would be all right, and then furnished me an inspector who opened every
piece of my baggage just as if I had been one of the wicked."
We could not help laughing, and our friend grinned appreciatively. "And
what was that supreme instance of caressing irony which you experienced
in Boston?" we pursued.
"Ah, _there_ is something I don't think you can question. But I didn't
experience it; I merely observed it. We were coming down the stairs to
take our hack at the foot of the pier, and an elderly lady who was
coming down with us found the footing a little insecure. The man in
charge bade her be careful, and then she turned upon him in severe
reproof, and scolded him well. She told him that he ought to have those
stairs looked after, for otherwise somebody would be killed one of these
days. 'Well, ma'am,' he said, 'I shouldn't like that. I was in a
railroad accident once. But I tell you what you do. The next time you
come over here, you just telephone me, and I'll have these steps fixed.
Or, I'll tell you: you just write me a letter and let me know exactly
how you want 'em fixed, and I'll see to it myself.'"
"That was charming," we had to own, "and it was of an irony truly
caressing, as you say. Do you think it was exactly respectful?"
"It was affectionate, and I think the lady liked it as much as any of
us, or as the humorist himself."
"Yes, it was just so her own son might have joked her," we assented.
"But tell us, Croesus," we continued, in the form of Socratic dialogue,
"did you find at Boston that multiple unmannerliness which you say is
apparent from the vast increase of adoptive citizens? We have been in
the habit of going to Boston when we wished to refresh our impression
that we had a native country; when we wished to find ourselves in the
midst of the good old American faces, which were sometimes rather
arraigning in their expression, but not too severe for the welfare of a
person imaginably demoralized by a New York sojourn."
Our friend allowed himself time for reflection. "I don't think you could
do that now with any great hope of success. I should say that the
predominant face in Boston now was some type of Irish face. You know
that the civic affairs of Boston are now in the hands of the Irish. And
with reason, if the Irish are in the majority."
"In New York it has long been the same without the reason," we dreamily
suggested.
"In Boston," our friend went on, without regarding us, "the Catholics
outvote the Protestants, and not because they vote oftener, but because
there are more of them."
"And the heavens do not fall?"
"It is not a question of that; it is a question of whether the Irish are
as amiable and civil as the Americans, now they are on top."
"We always supposed they were one of the most amiable and civil of the
human races. Surely you found them so?"
"I did at Queenstown, but at Boston I had not the courage to test the
fact. I would not have liked to try a joke with one of them as I would
at Queenstown, or as I would at Boston with an American. Their faces did
not arraign me, but they forbade me. It was very curious, and I may have
misread them."
"Oh, probably not," we lightly mocked. "They were taking it out of you
for ages of English oppression; they were making you stand for the Black
Cromwell."
"Oh, very likely," our friend said, in acceptance of our irony, because
he liked irony so much. "But, all the same, I thought it a pity, as I
think it a pity when I meet a surly Italian here, who at home would be
so sweet and gentle. It is somehow our own fault. We have spoiled them
by our rudeness; they think it is American to be as rude as the
Americans. They mistake our incivility for our liberty."
"There is something in what you say," we agreed, "if you will allow us
to be serious. They are here in our large, free air, without the
parasites that kept them in bounds in their own original habitat. We
must invent some sort of culture which shall be constructive and not
destructive, and will supply the eventual good without the provisional
evil."
"Then we must go a great way back, and begin with our grandfathers, with
the ancestors who freed us from Great Britain, but did not free
themselves from the illusion that equality resides in incivility and
honesty in bluntness. That was something they transmitted to us intact,
so that we are now not only the best-hearted but the worst-mannered of
mankind. If our habitual carriage were not rubber-tired by irony, we
should be an intolerable offence, if not to the rest of the world, at
least to ourselves. By-the-way, since I came back I have been reading a
curious old book by James Fenimore Cooper, which I understand made a
great stir in its day. Do you know it?--_Home as Found?_"
"We know it as one may know a book which one has not read. It pretty
nearly made an end of James Fenimore Cooper, we believe. His
fellow-countrymen fell on him, tooth and nail. We didn't take so kindly
to criticism in those days as we do now, when it merely tickles the fat
on our ribs, and we respond with the ironic laughter you profess to like
so much. What is the drift of the book besides the general censure?"
"Oh, it is the plain, dull tale of an American family returning home
after a long sojourn in Europe so high-bred that you want to kill them,
and so superior to their home-keeping countrymen that, vulgarity for
vulgarity, you much prefer the vulgarity of the Americans who have not
been away. The author's unconsciousness of the vulgarity of his
exemplary people is not the only amusing thing in the book. They arrive
for a short stay in New York before they go to their country-seat
somewhere up the State, and the sketches of New York society as it was
in the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century are certainly
delightful: society was then so exactly like what it is now in spirit.
Of course, it was very provincial, but society is always and everywhere
provincial. One thing about it then was different from what it is now: I
mean the attitude of the stay-at-homes toward the been-abroads. They
revered them and deferred to them, and they called them Hajii, or
travellers, in a cant which must have been very common, since George
William Curtis used the same Oriental term for his _Howadji in Syria_
and his _Nile Notes of a Howadji_."
"We must read it," we said, with the readiness of one who never intends
to read the book referred to. "What you say of it is certainly very
suggestive. But how do you account for the decay of the reverence and
deference in which the Hajii were once held?"
"Well, they may have overworked their superiority."
"Or?" we prompted.
"The stay-at-homes may have got onto the been-abroads in a point where
we all fail, unless we have guarded ourselves very scrupulously."
"And that is?"
"There is something very vulgarizing for Americans in the European
atmosphere, so that we are apt to come back worse-mannered than we went
away, and vulgarer than the untravelled, in so far as it is impoliter to
criticise than to be criticised."
"And is that why your tone has been one of universal praise for your
countrymen in the present interview?"
Our friend reached for his hat, smoothed a ruffled edge of the crown,
and blew a speck of dust from it. "One reasons to a conclusion," he
said, "not from it."
IX
NEW YORK TO THE HOME-COMER'S EYE
Our friend came in with challenge in his eye, and though a month had
passed, we knew, as well as if it were only a day, that he had come to
require of us the meaning in that saying of ours that New York derived
her inspiration from the future, or would derive it, if she ever got it.
"Well," he said, "have you cleared your mind yet sufficiently to 'pour
the day' on mine? Or hadn't you any meaning in what you said? I've
sometimes suspected it."
The truth is that we had not had very much meaning of the sort that you
stand and deliver, though we were aware of a large, vague wisdom in our
words. But we perceived that our friend had no intention of helping us
out, and on the whole we thought it best to temporize.
"In the first place," we said, "we should like to know what impression
New York made on you when you arrived here, if there was any room left
on your soul-surface after the image of Boston had been imprinted
there."
No man is unwilling to expatiate concerning himself, even when he is
trying to corner a fellow-man. This principle of human nature perhaps
accounts for the frequent failure of thieves to catch thieves, in spite
of the proverb; the pursuit suggests somehow the pleasures of
autobiography, and while they are reminded of this and that the suspects
escape the detectives. Our friend gladly paused to reply:
"I wish I could say! It was as unbeautiful as it could be, but it was
wonderful! Has anybody else ever said that there is no place like it? On
some accounts I am glad there isn't; one place of the kind is enough;
but what I mean is that I went about all the next day after arriving
from Boston, with Europe still in my brain, and tried for something
suggestive of some other metropolis, and failed. There was no question
of Boston, of course; that was clean out of it after my first glimpse of
Fifth Avenue in taxicabbing hotelward from the Grand Central Station.
But I tried with Berlin, and found it a drearier Boston; with Paris, and
found it a blonder and blither Boston; with London, and found it
sombrely irrelevant and incomparable. New York is like London only in
not being like any other place, and it is next to London in magnitude.
So far, so good; but the resemblance ends there, though New York is
oftener rolled in smoke, or mist, than we willingly allow to Londoners.
Both, however, have an admirable quality which is not beauty. One might
call the quality picturesque immensity in London, and in New York one
might call it--"
He compressed his lips, and shut his eyes to a fine line for the greater
convenience of mentally visioning.
"What?" we impatiently prompted.
"I was going to say, sublimity. What do you think of sublimity?"
"We always defend New York against you. We accept sublimity. How?"
"I was thinking of the drive up or down Fifth Avenue, the newer Fifth
Avenue, which has risen in marble and Indiana limestone from the
brownstone and brick of a former age, the Augustan Fifth Avenue which
has replaced that old Lincolnian Fifth Avenue. You get the effect best
from the top of one of the imperial motor-omnibuses which have replaced
the consular two-horse stages; and I should say that there was more
sublimity to the block between Sixteenth Street and Sixtieth than in the
other measures of the city's extent."
[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE AT THIRTY-FOURTH STREET]
"This is very gratifying to us as a fond New-Yorker; but why leave out
of the reach of sublimity the region of the sky-scrapers, and the
spacious, if specious, palatiality of the streets on the upper West
Side?"