feet than their English cousins. Perhaps the very best waltzers I have
ever danced with were English girls, who understood the poetry of the
art and knew how to reflect not merely the time of the music, but its
_nuances_ of rhythm and tone. But dancers such as these are like
fairies' visits, that come but once or twice in a lifetime; and a
large proportion of English girls dance very badly. In America one
seldom or never finds a girl who cannot dance fairly, and most of them
can claim much warmer adverbs than that. The American invention of
"reversing" is admirable in its unexaggerated form, but requires both
study and practice; and the reason that it was voted "bad form" in
England was simply that the indolence of the gilded youth prevented
him ever taking the trouble to master it. Our genial satirist _Punch_
hit the nail on the head: "Shall we--eh--reverse, Miss Lilian?"
"Reverse, indeed; it's as much as you can do to keep on your legs as
it is."
One custom at American dances struck me as singularly stupid and
un-American in its inelasticity. I know not how widespread it is, or
how fashionable, but it reigned in circles which seemed to my
unsophisticated eyes quite _comme il faut_. The custom is that by
which a man having once asked a lady to dance becomes responsible for
her until someone else offers himself as her partner. It probably
arose from the chivalrous desire not to leave any girl partnerless,
but in practice it works out quite the other way. When a man realises
that he _may_ have to retain the same partner for several dances, or
even for the greater part of the evening, he will, unless he is a
Bayard absolutely _sans peur et sans reproche_, naturally think twice
of engaging a lady from whom his release is problematical. Hence the
tendency is to increase the triumphs of the belle, and decrease the
chances of the less popular maiden. It is also extremely uncomfortable
for a girl to feel that a man has (to use the ugly slang of the
occasion) "got stuck" with her; and it takes more adroitness and
self-possession than any young girl can be expected to possess to
extricate herself neatly from the awkward position. Another funny
custom at subscription balls of a very respectable character is that
many of the matrons wear their bonnets throughout the evening. But
this, perhaps, is not stranger than the fact that ladies wear hats in
the theatre, while the men who accompany them are in evening dress--a
curious habit which to the uninitiated observer would suggest that the
nymphs belonged to a less fashionable stratum than their attendant
swains. A parallel instance is that of afternoon receptions, where the
hostess and her myrmidons appear in ball costume, while the visitors
are naturally in the toilette of the street. The contrast thus evolved
of low necks and heavy furs is often very comical. The British
convention by which the hostess always dresses as plainly as possible
so as to avoid the chance of eclipsing any of her guests, and so
chooses to _briller par sa simplicité_, is in other cases also more
honoured in the breach than in the observance in America.
A very characteristic little piece of the social democracy of America
is seen at its best in Chicago, though not unknown in other large
cities. On the evening of a hot summer day cushions and rugs are
spread on the front steps of the houses, and the occupants take
possession of these, the men to enjoy their after-dinner cigars, the
women to talk and scan the passers-by. The general effect is very
genial and picturesque, and decidedly suggestive of democratic
sociability. The same American indifference to the exaggerated British
love of privacy which leads John Bull to enclose his fifty-foot-square
garden by a ten-foot wall is shown in the way in which the gardens of
city houses are left unfenced. Nothing can be more attractive in its
way than such a street as Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, where the pretty
villas stand in unenclosed gardens, and the verdant lawns melt
imperceptibly into each other without advertisement of where one
leaves off and the other begins, while the fronts towards the street
are equally exposed. The general effect is that of a large and
beautiful park dotted with houses. The American is essentially
gregarious in his instinct, and the possession of a vast feudal
domain, with a high wall round it, can never make up to him for the
excitement of near neighbours. It may seriously be doubted whether the
American millionaire who buys a lordly demesne in England is not doing
violence to his natural and national tastes every day that he inhabits
it.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Mrs. Burton Harrison reports that a young New York matron said to
her, "Really, now that society in New York is getting so large, one
must draw the line somewhere; after this I shall visit and invite only
those who have more than five millions."
[7] I have seen a brakeman on a passenger train wear overshoes on a
showery day, though his duties hardly ever compelled him to leave the
covered cars.
IV
An Appreciation of the American Woman
Compared to the appearance of the American girl in books written about
the United States, that of Charles I.'s head in Mr. Dick's memorial
might perhaps be almost called casual. All down the literary ladder,
from the weighty tomes of a Professor Bryce to the witty persiflage of
a Max O'Rell, we find a considerable part of every rung occupied by
the skirts appropriated to the gentler sex; and--what is, perhaps,
stranger still--she holds her own even in books written by women. It
need not be asserted that all the references to her are equally
agreeable. That amiable critic, Sir Lepel Griffin, alludes to her only
to assure us that "he had never met anyone who had lived long or
travelled much in America who did not hold that female beauty in the
States is extremely rare, while the average of ordinary good looks is
unusually low," and even visitors of an infinitely more subtle and
discriminating type, such as M. Bourget, mingle not a little vinegar
with their syrup of appreciation. But the fact remains that almost
every book on the United States contains a chapter devoted explicitly
to the female citizen; and the inevitableness of the record must have
some solid ground of reason behind or below it. It indicates a vein of
unusual significance, or at the very least of unusual conspicuousness,
in the phenomenon thus treated of. Observers have usually found it
possible to write books on the social and economical traits of other
countries without a parade of petticoats in the head-lines. This is
not to say that one can ignore one-half of society in writing of it;
but if you search the table of contents of such books as Mr. Philip
Hamerton's charming "French and English," or Mr. T.H.S. Escott's
"England: Its People, Polity, and Pursuits," you will not find the
words "woman" or "girl," or any equivalent for them. But the writer on
the United States seems irresistibly compelled to give woman all that
coördinate importance which is implied by the prominence of capital
letters and separate chapters.
This predominance of woman in books on America is not by any means a
phase of the "woman question," technically so called. It has no direct
reference to the woman as voter, as doctor, as lawyer, as the
competitor of man; the subject of interest is woman as woman, the
_Ding an sich_ of German philosophical slang. No doubt the writer may
have occasion to allude to Dr. Mary Walker, to the female mayors of
Wyoming, to the presidential ambitions of Mrs. Belva Lockwood; but
these are mere adjuncts, not explanations, of the question under
consideration. The European visitor to the United States _has_ to
write about American women because they bulk so largely in his view,
because they seem essentially so prominent a feature of American life;
because their _relative_ importance and interest impress him as
greater than those of women in the lands of the Old World, because
they seem to him to embody in so eminent a measure that intangible
quality of Americanism, the existence, or indeed the possibility, of
which is so hotly denied by some Americans.
Indeed, those who look upon the prominent rôle of the American woman
merely as one phase of the "new woman" question--merely as the
inevitable conspicuousness of woman intruding on what has hitherto
been exclusively the sphere of man--are many degrees beside the point.
The American note is as obvious in the girl who has never taken the
slightest interest in polities, the professions, or even the bicycle,
as in Dr. Mary Walker or Mrs. Lockwood. The prevalent English idea of
the actual interference of the American woman in public life is
largely exaggerated. There are, for instance, in Massachusetts 625,000
women entitled to vote for members of the school committees; and the
largest actual vote recorded is 20,140. Of 175,000 women of voting age
in Connecticut the numbers who used their vote in the last three years
were 3,806, 3,241, and 1,906. These, if any, are typical American
States; and there is not the shadow of a doubt that the 600,000 women
who stayed at home are quite as "American" as the 20,000 who went to
the poll. The sphere of the American woman's influence and the reason
of her importance lie behind politics and publicity.
It seems a reasonable assumption that the formation of the American
girl is due to the same large elemental causes that account for
American phenomena generally; and her _relative_ strikingness may be
explained by the reflection that there was more room for these great
forces to work in the case of woman than in the case of man. The
Englishman, for instance, through his contact with public life and
affairs, through his wider experience, through his rubbing shoulders
with more varied types, had already been prepared for the working of
American conditions in a way that his more sheltered womankind had
not been. In the bleaching of the black and the grey, the change will
be the more striking in the former; the recovery of health will be
conspicuous in proportion to the gravity of the disease. America has
meant opportunity for women even more in some ways than for men. The
gap between them has been lessened in proportion as the gap between
the American and the European has widened. The average American woman
is distinctly more different from her average English sister than is
the case with their respective brothers. The training of the English
girl starts from the very beginning on a different basis from that of
the boy; she is taught to restrain her impulses, while his are allowed
much freer scope; the sister is expected to defer to the brother from
the time she can walk or talk. In America this difference of training
is constantly tending to the vanishing point. The American woman has
never learned to play second fiddle. The American girl, as Mr. Henry
James says, is rarely negative; she is either (and usually) a most
charming success or (and exceptionally) a most disastrous failure. The
pathetic army of ineffective spinsters clinging apologetically to the
skirts of gentility is conspicuous by its absence in America. The
conditions of life there encourage a girl to undertake what she can do
best, with a comparatively healthy disregard of its fancied
"respectability." Her consciousness of efficiency reacts in a thousand
ways; her feet are planted on so solid a foundation that she
inevitably seems an important constructive part of society. The
contrast between the American woman and the English woman in this
respect may be illustrated by the two Caryatides in the Braccio Nuovo
at the Vatican. The first of these, a copy of one of the figures of
the Erechtheum, seems to bear the superincumbent architrave easily and
securely, with her feet planted squarely and the main lines running
vertically. In the other, of a later period, the fact that the feet
are placed close together gives an air of insecurity to the attitude,
an effect heightened by the prevalence of curved lines in the folds of
the drapery.
The American woman, too, has had more time than the American man to
cultivate the more amiable--if you will, the more showy--qualities of
American civilisation. The leisured class of England consists of both
sexes, that of America practically of one only. The problem of the
American man so far has mainly been to subdue a new continent to human
uses, while the woman has been sacrificing on the altar of the Graces.
Hence the wider culture and the more liberal views are often found in
the sex from which the European does not expect them; hence the woman
of New York and other American cities is often conspicuously superior
to her husband in looks, manners, and general intelligence. This has
been denied by champions of the American man; but the observation of
the writer, whatever it may be worth, would deny the denial.
The way in which an expression such as "Ladies' Cabin" is understood
in the United States has always seemed to me very typical of the
position of the gentler sex in that country. In England, when we see
an inscription of that kind, we assume that the enclosure referred to
is for ladies _only_. In America, unless the "only" is emphasized, the
"Ladies' Drawing Room" or the "Ladies' Waiting Room" extends its
hospitality to all those of the male sex who are ready to behave as
gentlemen and temporarily forego the delights of tobacco. Thus half of
the male passengers of the United States journey, as it were, under
the ægis of woman, and think it no shame to be enclosed in a box
labelled with her name.
Put roughly, what chiefly strikes the stranger in the American woman
is her candour, her frankness, her hail-fellow-well-met-edness, her
apparent absence of consciousness of self or of sex, her spontaneity,
her vivacity, her fearlessness. If the observer himself is not of a
specially refined or delicate type, he is apt at first to
misunderstand the cameraderie of an American girl, to see in it
suggestions of a possible coarseness of fibre. If a vain man, he may
take it as a tribute to his personal charms, or at least to the
superior claims of a representative of old-world civilisation. But
even to the obtuse stranger of this character it will ultimately
become obvious--as to the more refined observer _ab initio_--that he
can no more (if as much) dare to take a liberty with the American girl
than with his own countrywoman. The plum may appear to be more easily
handled, but its bloom will be found to be as intact and as ethereal
as in the jealously guarded hothouse fruit of Europe. He will find
that her frank and charming companionability is as far removed from
masculinity as from coarseness; that the points in which she differs
from the European lady do not bring her nearer either to a man on the
one hand, or to a common woman on the other. He will find that he has
to readjust his standards, to see that divergence from the best type
of woman hitherto known to him does not necessarily mean
deterioration; if he is of an open and susceptible mind, he may even
come to the conclusion that he prefers the transatlantic type!
Unless his lines in England have lain in _very_ pleasant places, the
intelligent Englishman in enjoying his first experience of
transatlantic society will assuredly be struck by the sprightliness,
the variety, the fearless individuality of the American girl, by her
power of repartee, by the quaint appositeness of her expressions, by
the variety of her interests, by the absence of undue deference to his
masculine dignity. If in his newly landed innocence he ventures to
compliment the girl he talks with on the purity of her English, and
assumes that she differs in that respect from her companions, she will
patriotically repel the suggested accusation of her countrywomen by
assuring him, without the ghost of a smile, "that she has had special
advantages, inasmuch as an English missionary had been stationed near
her tribe." If she prefers Martin Tupper to Shakespeare, or Strauss to
Beethoven, she will say so without a tremor. Why should she
hypocritically subordinate her personal instincts to a general theory
of taste? Her independence is visible in her very dress; she wears
what she thinks suits her (and her taste is seldom at fault), not
merely what happens to be the fashionable freak of the moment. What
Englishman does not shudder when he remembers how each of his
womankind--the comely and the homely, the short and the long, the
stout and the lean--at once assumed the latest form of hat, apparently
utterly oblivious to the question of whether it suited her special
style of beauty or not? Now, an American girl is not built that way.
She wishes to be in the fashion just as much as she can; but if a
special item of fashion does not set her off to advantage, she
gracefully and courageously resigns it to those who can wear it with
profit. But honour where honour is due! The English girl generally
shows more sense of fitness in the dress for walking and travelling;
she, consciously or unconsciously, realises that adaptability for its
practical purpose is essential in such a case.
The American girl, as above said, strikes one as individual, as
varied. In England when we meet a girl in a ball-room we can
generally--not always--"place" her after a few minutes' talk; she
belongs to a set of which you remember to have already met a volume or
two. In some continental countries the patterns in common use seem
reduced to three or four. In the United States every new girl is a new
sensation. Society consists of a series of surprises. Expectation is
continually piqued. A and B and C do not help you to induce D; when you
reach Z you _may_ imagine you find a slight trace of reincarnation.
Not that the surprises are invariably pleasant. The very force and
self-confidence of the American girl doubly and trebly underline the
undesirable. Vulgarity that would be stolid and stodgy in Middlesex
becomes blatant and aggressive in New York.
The American girl is not hampered by the feeling of class distinction,
which has for her neither religious nor historical sanction. The
English girl is first the squire's daughter, second a good
churchwoman, third an English subject, and fourthly a woman. Even the
best of them cannot rise wholly superior to the all-pervading, and,
in its essence, vulgarising, superstition that some of her
fellow-creatures are not fit to come between the wind and her
nobility. Those who reject the theory do so by a self-conscious effort
which in itself is crude and a strain. The American girl is, however,
born into an atmosphere of unconsciousness of all this, and, unless
she belongs to a very narrow coterie, does not reach this point of
view either as believer or antagonist. This endues her, at her best,
with a sweet and subtle fragrance of humanity that is, perhaps,
unique. Free from any sense of inherited or conventional superiority
or inferiority, as devoid of the brutality of condescension as of the
meanness of toadyism, she combines in a strangely attractive way the
charm of eternal womanliness with the latest aroma of a progressive
century. It is, doubtless, this quality that M. Bourget has in view
when he speaks of the incomparable delicacy of the American girl, or
M. Paul Blouët when he asserts that "you find in the American woman a
quality which, I fear, is beginning to disappear in Paris and is
almost unknown in London--a kind of spiritualised politeness, a tender
solicitude for other people, combined with strong individuality."
There is one type of girl, with whom even the most modest and most
moderately eligible of bachelors must be familiar in England, who is
seldom in evidence in the United States--she whom the American
aborigines might call the "Girl-Anxious-to-be-Married." What
right-minded man in any circle of British society has not shuddered at
the open pursuit of young Croesus? Have not our novelists and
satirists reaped the most ample harvest from the pitiable spectacle
and all its results? A large part of the advantage that American
society has over English rests in the comparative absence of this
phenomenon. Man there does not and cannot bear himself as the cynosure
of the female eye; the art of throwing the handkerchief has not been
included in his early curriculum. The American dancing man does not
dare to arrive just in time for supper or to lounge in the doorway
while dozens of girls line the walls in faded expectation of a waltz.
The English girl herself can hardly be blamed for this state of
things. She has been brought up to think that marriage is the be-all
and end-all of her existence. "For my part," writes the author of
"Cecil, the Coxcomb," "I never blame them when I see them capering and
showing off their little monkey-tricks, for conquest. The fault is
none of theirs. It is part of an erroneous system." Lady Jeune
expresses the orthodox English position when she asserts flatly that
"to deny that marriage is the object of woman's existence is absurd."
The anachronistic survival of the laws of primogeniture and entail
practically makes the marriage of the daughter the only alternative
for a descent to a lower sphere of society. In the United States the
proportion of girls who strike one as obvious candidates for marriage
is remarkably small. This _may_ be owing to the art with which the
American woman conceals her lures, but all the evidence points to its
being in the main an entirely natural and unconscious attitude. The
American girl has all along been so accustomed to associate on equal
terms with the other sex that she naturally and inevitably regards him
more in the light of a comrade than of a possible husband. She has so
many resources, and is so independent, that marriage does not bound
her horizon.
Her position, however, is not one of antagonism to marriage. If it
were, I should be the last to commend it. It rather rests on an
assurance of equality, on the assumption that marriage is an
honourable estate--a rounding and completing of existence--for man as
much as for woman. Nor does it mean, I think, any lack of passion and
the deepest instincts of womanhood. All these are present and can be
wakened by the right man at the right time. Indeed, the very fact that
marriage (with or without love) is not incessantly in the foreground
of an American girl's consciousness probably makes the awakening all
the more deep and tender because comparatively unanticipated and
unforeseen.
The marriages between American heiresses and European peers do not
militate seriously against the above view of American marriage. It
cannot be sufficiently emphasised that the doings of a few wealthy
people in New York are not characteristic of American civilisation.
The New York _Times_ was entirely right when it said, in commenting
upon the frank statement of the bridegroom in a recent alliance of
this kind that it had been _arranged_ by friends of both parties: "A
few years ago this frankness would have cost him his bride, if his
'friends' had chosen an American girl for that distinction, and even
now it would be resented to the point of a rupture of the engagement
by most American girls."