and indivisible, so that anybody may wear them, though the oldest
nobility are officially and legally known only by their Christian and
family names, without any prefix. This is practically returning to
Citoyen and Citoyenne, and it almost gives us the courage to suggest the
experiment of Citizen and Citizenne as a proper address on the letters
of American republicans. The matter might be referred to a Board,
something like that of the Simplified Spelling Board, though we should
not like to be included in a committee whose members must be prepared to
take their lives in their hands, or, short of death, to suffer every
manner of shame at the hands of our journalists and their
correspondents. Short of the adoption of Citizen and Citizenne, we have
no choice but to address one another by our given names and surnames
merely, unless we prefer to remain in our present confusion of Mr. and
Esq. In a very little while, we dare say, no lady or gentleman would
mind being so addressed on his or her letters; but perhaps some men and
women might. Now that we no longer use pets names so much, except among
the very highest of our noblesse, where there are still Jimmies and
Mamies, we believe, plain Gladys Smythe or Reginald Johnes would be the
usual superscription. Such an address could bring no discomfort to the
recipient (a beautiful word, very proper in this connection), and if it
could once be generally adopted it would save a great deal of anxiety.
The lady's condition could be indicated by the suffix Spinster, in the
case of her being single; if married, the initials of her husband's
given names could be added.
III
DRESSING FOR HOTEL DINNER
Among the high excitements of a recent winter in New York was one of
such convulsive intensity that in the nature of things it could not last
very long. It affected the feminine temperament of our public with
hysterical violence, but left the community the calmer for its throes,
and gently, if somewhat pensively, smiling in a permanent ignorance of
the event. No outside observer would now be able to say, offhand,
whether a certain eminent innkeeper had or had not had his way with his
customers in the matter not only of what they should eat or drink, but
what they should wear when dining in a place which has been described as
"supplying exclusiveness to the lower classes." It is not even certain
just how a crucial case was brought to the notice of this authority;
what is certain is that his instant judgment was that no white male
citizen frequenting his proud tavern should sit at dinner there unless
clothed in a dress-coat, or at least in the smoking-jacket known to us
as a Tuxedo; at breakfast or at luncheon, probably, the guest, the
paying guest, could sufficiently shine in the reflected glory of the
lustrous evening wear of the waiters. No sooner was the innkeeper's
judgment rendered than a keen thrill of resentment, or at least
amusement, ran through the general breast. From every quarter the
reporters hastened to verify the fact at first-hand, and then to submit
it to the keeper of every other eminent inn or eating-house in the city
and learn his usage and opinion. These to a man disavowed any such
hard-and-fast rule. Though their paying guests were ordinarily gentlemen
of such polite habits as to be incapable of dining in anything but a
dress-coat or a Tuxedo, yet their inns and eating-houses were not barred
against those who chose to dine in a frock or cutaway or even a sacque.
It is possible that the managers imagined themselves acquiring merit
with that large body of our vulgar who demand exclusiveness by their
avowal of a fine indifference or an enlightened tolerance in the matter.
But at this distance of time no one can confidently say how the incident
was closed with respect to the pre-eminent innkeeper and his proud
tavern. Whether the wayfarer, forced by the conditions of travel upon
the company of the exclusive vulgar, may now dine there in the public
banqueting-hall in his daytime raiment, or must take his evening meal in
his room, with a penalty in the form of an extra charge for service,
nowise appears.
What is apparent from the whole affair is that the old ideal of one's
inn, as a place where one shall take one's ease, has perished in the
evolution of the magnificent American hotel which we have been
maliciously seeking to minify in the image of its Old World germ. One
may take one's ease in one's hotel only if one is dressed to the mind of
the hotel-keeper, or perhaps finally the head waiter. But what is more
important still is that probably the vast multitude of the moneyed
vulgar whose exclusiveness is supplied to them in such a place dictate,
tacitly at least, the Draconian policy of the management. No innkeeper
or head waiter, no matter of how patrician an experience or prejudice,
would imagine a measure of such hardship to wayfarers willing to pay for
the simple comfort of their ancestors at the same rate as their
commensals stiffly shining in the clothes of convention. The management
might have its conception of what a hotel dining-room should look like,
with an unbroken array of gentlemen in black dress-coats and ladies in
white shoulders all feeding as superbly as if they were not paying for
their dinners, or as if they had been severally asked for the pleasure
of their company two weeks before; and the picture would doubtless be
marred by figures of people in cutaways and high necks, to a degree
intolerable to the artistic sense. But it is altogether impossible that
the management would exact a conformity to the general effect which was
not desired by the vast majority of its paying guests. What might well
have seemed a break on the part of the pre-eminent innkeeper when he
cited as a precedent for his decision the practice of the highest hotels
in London was really no break, but a stroke of the finest juridical
acumen. Nothing could have gone further with the vast majority of his
paying guests than some such authority, for they could wish nothing so
much, in the exclusiveness supplied them, as the example of the real
characters in the social drama which they were impersonating. They had
the stage and the scenery; they had spared no expense in their
costuming; they had anxiously studied their parts, and for the space of
their dinner-hour they had the right to the effect of aristocratic
society, which they were seeking, unmarred by one discordant note. After
that hour, let it be a cramped stall in the orchestra of another
theatre, or let it be an early bed in a cell of their colossal
columbary, yet they would have had their dinner-hour when they shone
primarily just like the paying guests in the finest English hotel, and
secondarily just like the non-paying guests at the innumerable dinners
of the nobility and gentry in a thousand private houses in London.
Our aim is always high, and they would be right to aim at nothing lower
than this in their amateur dramatics. But here we have a question which
we have been holding back by main force from the beginning, and which
now persists in precipitating itself in our peaceful page. It is a
question which merits wider and closer study than we can give it, and it
will, we hope, find an answer such as we cannot supply in the wisdom of
the reader. It presented itself to the mind of Eugenio in a recent
experience of his at a famous seaside resort which does not remit its
charm even in the heart of winter, and which with the first tremor of
the opening spring allures the dweller among the sky-scrapers and the
subways with an irresistible appeal. We need not further specify the
place, but it is necessary to add that it draws not only the jaded or
sated New-Yorker, but the more eager and animated average of well-to-do
people from every part of their country who have got bored out with
their happy homes and want a few days' or a few weeks' change. One may
not perhaps meet a single distinguished figure on its famous promenade,
or at least more distinguished than one's own; with the best will in the
world to find such figures, Eugenio could count but three or four: a
tall, alert, correct man or two; an electly fashioned, perfectly set-up,
dominant woman or so, whose bearing expressed the supremacy of a set in
some unquestionable world. But there was obvious riches aplenty, and
aplenty of the kind wholesomeness of the good, true, intelligent, and
heaven-bound virtue of what we must begin to call our middle class,
offensive as the necessity may be. Here and there the effect of
champagne in the hair, which deceived no one but the wearer, was to be
noted; here and there, high-rolling, a presence with the effect of
something more than champagne in the face loomed in the perspective
through the haze of a costly cigar. But by far, immensely far, the
greater number of his fellow-frequenters of the charming promenade were
simple, domestic, well-meaning Americans like Eugenio himself, of a
varying simplicity indeed, but always of a simplicity. They were the
stuff with which his fancy (he never presumed to call it his
imagination) had hitherto delighted to play, fondly shaping out of the
collective material those lineaments and expressions which he hoped
contained a composite likeness of his American day and generation. The
whole situation was most propitious, and yet he found himself moving
through it without one of the impulses which had been almost lifelong
with him. As if in some strange paralysis, some obsession by a demon of
indifference unknown before, he was bereft of the will to realize these
familiar protagonists of his plain dramas. He knew them, of course; he
knew them all too well; but he had not the wish to fit the likest of
them with phrases, to costume them for their several parts, to fit them
into the places in the unambitious action where they had so often
contributed to the modest but inevitable catastrophe.
The experience repeated itself till he began to take himself by the
collar and shake himself in the dismay of a wild conjecture. What had
befallen him? Had he gone along, young, eager, interested, delighted
with his kind for half a century of aesthetic consciousness, and now had
he suddenly lapsed into the weariness and apathy of old age? It is
always, short of ninety, too soon for that, and Eugenio was not yet
quite ninety. Was his mind, then, prematurely affected? But was not this
question itself proof that his mind was still importunately active? If
that was so, why did not he still wish to make his phrases about his
like, to reproduce their effect in composite portraiture? Eugenio fell
into a state so low that nothing but the confession of his perplexity
could help him out; and the friend to whom he owned his mystifying, his
all but appalling, experience did not fail him in his extremity. "No,"
he wrote back, "it is not that you have seen all these people, and that
they offer no novel types for observation, but even more that they
illustrate the great fact that, in the course of the last twenty years,
society in America has reached its goal, has 'arrived,' and is creating
no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterating some of the best which
were clearly marked, and is becoming more and more one rich, dead level
of mediocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, some of
which are genuine, some only false peaks without solid rock
foundations."
Such a view of his case must be immediately and immensely consoling, but
it was even more precious to Eugenio for the suggestion from which his
fancy--never imagination--began to play forward with the vivacity of
that of a youth of sixty, instead of a middle-aged man of eighty-five.
If all this were true--and its truth shone the more distinctly from a
ground of potential dissent--was not there the stuff in the actual
conditions from which a finer artist than he could ever hope to be, now
that the first glow of his prime was past, might fashion an image of our
decadence, or our arrest, so grandly, so perfectly dull and
uninteresting, that it would fix all the after-ages with the sovereign
authority of a masterpiece? Here, he tremblingly glowed to realize, was
opportunity, not for him, indeed, but for some more modern, more
divinely inspired lover of the mediocre, to eternize our typelessness
and establish himself among the many-millioned heirs of fame. It had
been easy--how easy it had been!--to catch the likeness of those
formative times in which he had lived and wrought; but the triumph and
the reward of the new artist would be in proportion to the difficulty of
seizing the rich, self-satisfied, ambitionless, sordid commonplace of a
society wishing to be shut up in a steam-heated, electric-lighted palace
and fed fat in its exclusiveness with the inexhaustible inventions of an
overpaid chef. True, the strong, simple days of the young republic, when
men forgot themselves in the struggle with the wild continent, were
past; true, the years were gone when the tremendous adventure of tearing
from her heart the iron and the gold which were to bind her in lasting
subjection gave to fiction industrial heroes fierce and bold as those of
classic fable or mediaeval romance. But there remained the days of the
years which shall apparently have no end, but shall abound forever in an
inexhaustible wealth of the sort wishing not so much to rise itself as
to keep down and out all suggestion of the life from which it sprang.
The sort of type which would represent this condition would be vainly
sought in any exceptionally opulent citizen of that world. He would
have, if nothing else, the distinction of his unmeasured millions, which
would form a poetry, however sordid; the note of the world we mean is
indistinction, and the protagonist of the fiction seeking to portray its
fads and characters must not have more than two or three millions at the
most. He, or better she, were better perhaps with only a million, or a
million and a half, or enough to live handsomely in eminent inns, either
at home or abroad, with that sort of insolent half-knowledge to which
culture is contemptible; which can feel the theatre, but not literature;
which has passed from the horse to the automobile; which has its moral
and material yacht, cruising all social coasts and making port in none
where there is not a hotel or cottage life as empty and exclusive as its
own. Even in trying to understate the sort, one overstates it. Nothing
could be more untrue to its reality than the accentuation of traits
which in the arrivals of society elsewhere and elsewhen have marked the
ultimation of the bourgeois spirit. Say that the Puritan, the Pilgrim,
the Cavalier, and the Merchant Adventurer have come and gone; say that
the Revolutionist Patriot, the Pioneer and the Backwoodsman and the
Noble Savage have come and gone; say that the Slaveholder and the Slave
and the Abolitionist and the Civil Warrior have come and gone; say that
the Miner, the Rancher, the Cowboy, and the sardonically humorous
Frontiersman have come and gone; say that the simple-hearted,
hard-working, modest, genial Homemakers have come and gone; say that the
Captain of Industry has come and gone, and the world-wide Financier is
going: what remains for actuality-loving art to mould into shapes of
perdurable beauty? Obviously, only the immeasurable mass of a prosperity
sunken in a self-satisfaction unstirred by conscience and unmoved by
desire. But is that a reason why art should despair? Rather it is a
reason why it should rejoice in an opportunity occurring not more than
once in the ages to seize the likeness and express the significance of
Arrival, the arrival of a whole civilization. To do this, art must
refine and re-refine upon itself; it must use methods of unapproached
delicacy, of unimagined subtlety and celerity. It is easy enough to
catch the look of the patrician in the upper air, of the plebeian
underfoot, but to render the image of a world-bourgeoisie, compacted in
characters of undeniable verisimilitude, that will be difficult, but it
will be possible, and the success will be of an effulgence such as has
never yet taken the eyes of wonder.
We should not be disposed to deny the artist, dedicated to this high
achievement by his love of the material not less than by his peculiar
gift, the range of a liberal idealism. We would not have him bound by
any precedent or any self-imposed law of literality. If he should see
his work as a mighty historical picture, or series of such pictures, we
should not gainsay him his conception or bind him rather to any _genre_
result. We ourselves have been evolving here the notion of some large
allegory which should bear the relation to all other allegories that
Bartholdi's colossus of Liberty bears to all other statues, and which
should carry forward the story and the hero, or the heroine, to some
such supreme moment as that when, amid the approving emotion of an
immense hotel dining-room, all in _decolletee_ and _frac pare_, the old,
simple-lived American, wearing a sack-coat and a colored shirt, shall be
led out between the eminent innkeeper and the head waiter and delivered
over to the police to be conducted in ignominy to the nearest Italian
table d'hote. The national character, on the broad level of equality
which fiction once delighted to paint, no longer exists, but if a
deeper, a richer, a more enduring monotony replaces it, we have no fear
but some genius will arrive and impart the effect of the society which
has arrived.
IV
THE COUNSEL OF LITERARY AGE TO LITERARY YOUTH
As Eugenio--we will call him Eugenio: a fine impersonal name--grew
older, and became, rightfully or wrongfully, more and more widely known
for his writings, he found himself increasingly the subject of appeal
from young writers who wished in their turn to become, rightfully or
wrongfully, more and more widely known. This is not, indeed, stating the
case with the precision which we like. His correspondents were young
enough already, but they were sometimes not yet writers; they had only
the ambition to be writers. Our loose formulation of the fact, however,
will cover all its meaning, and we will let it go that they were young
writers, for, whether they were or not, they all wished to know one
thing: namely, how he did it.
What, they asked in varying turns, was his secret, his recipe for making
the kind of literature which had made him famous: they did stint their
phrase, and they said famous. That always caused Eugenio to blush, at
first with shame and then with pleasure; whatever one's modesty, one
likes to be called famous, and Eugenio's pleasure in their flatteries
was so much greater than his shame that he thought only how to return
them the pleasure unmixed with the shame. His heart went out to those
generous youths, who sometimes confessed themselves still in their
teens, and often of the sex which is commonly most effective with the
fancy while still in its teens. It seemed such a very little thing to
show them the way to do what he had done, and, while disclaiming any
merit for it, to say why it was the best possible way. If they had
grouped him with other widely known writers in their admiration, he
never imagined directing his correspondents to those others' methods; he
said to himself that he did not understand them, and at bottom he felt
that it would have been better taste in the generous youths to have left
them out of the question.
In the end he never answered his correspondents in the handsome way he
had fancied. Generally he did not answer them at all, or, if he did, he
put them off with some such cheap excuse as advising them to be sure
they had something to say, and then to say it as simply and clearly as
they could. He knew very well that this was begging the question; that
the question was how to be artistic, graceful, charming, and whatever
else they said he himself was. If he was aware of not being all that, he
was aware also of having tried to be it; of having sought from the
beginning to captivate the reader's fancy as well as convince his
reason. He had never been satisfied with being plain and direct; he had
constantly wished to amuse as well as edify, and following the line of
beauty, as that of the least resistance, had been his practice if not
his precept. If he counselled his correspondents otherwise, he would be
uncandid, and when he had imagined putting them off in that fashion he
was more ashamed than he had been with their praise.
Yet, upon reflection, he perceived that what they asked was impossible.
If ever he had a formula he had lost it; he was no longer in his own
secret, if ever he had been. All that he could have said with perfect
honesty would have been that he had never found any royal road to
literature; that to his experience there was not even a common highway;
that there were only byways; private paths over other people's grounds;
easements beaten out by feet that had passed before, and giving by a
subsequent overgrowth of turf or brambles a deceitful sense of discovery
to the latest-comer.
His correspondents would not have liked that. He knew that what they
wanted was his measure of the old success in some new way, which they
could feel their own after it had been shown them. But the only secret
that he was still in was the very open one of working hard at whatever
he had in hand, and this he suspected they would have scorned sharing
with him. He could have said that if you want to keep three or five
balls in the air at once you must learn how by practising; but they knew
that as well as he; what they asked was being enabled to do it
themselves from _his_ having practised.
The perception of this fact made Eugenio very sad, and he asked himself
if the willingness to arrive only after you had got there had gone out
of the world and left nothing but the ambition to be at this point or
that without the trouble of having reached it. He smiled as he recalled
the stock criticism of the connoisseur in _The Vicar of Wakefield_, that
the picture would have been better if the painter had taken more pains;
but he did not smile gayly: there seemed to him a sum of pathetic wisdom
in the saying which might well weigh down the blithest spirit. It had
occurred to him in connection with an old essay of Hazlitt's, which he
had been reading, on the comparative methods of English and French
painters in their work. The essayist held, almost literally, that the
French pictures were better because the French painters had taken more
pains, and taken especial pains in the least interesting parts of their
pictures. He was dealing more specifically with copying, but his words
applied to the respective schools in their highest work, and he could
only save his patriotic pride, so far as he might, by saying: "Courage
is pure will without regard to consequences, and this the English have
in perfection. Poetry is our element, for the essence of poetry is will
and passion. The English fail as a people in the fine arts, namely,
because the end with them absorbs the means."