and music that you do, and are nice to dance with, why, then they
think they are going to be poets or composers, and so they don’t
work, and they flunk out of school—and your mother asks you why you
persist in playing around with ‘that worthless fellow’—doesn’t she,
Oliver?”
“Yep!” said her brother, and grinned.
Dorothy, leaning across my knees, first pinched, then patted him,
and said: “Poor old Ollie! He’s nicer than almost any boy I know, and
yet Dad says he’s a ‘worthless fellow,’ too.”
When I suggested that the only hope was to take one of these nice
worthless fellows and put some “starch” into him, the rear seat burst
into a peal of conspirant laughter. Possibly that hope had been
tried. Cornelia whirled around upon us, and demanded:—
“What are you children talking about?”
I answered sedately that we were discussing education for life, and
that there were certain points on which I should like her opinion.
But we were now at the clump of Rural Free Delivery boxes, where
the path comes down from my cottage. Intimating that I might “drop
around” toward the end of the afternoon, I got out, and having
handed up Cornelia’s mail, walked home with my own. It proved rather
piquantly amusing.
II
“LET’S WALK”
There was a light rain at lunch-time, but it blew over, leaving the
out-of-doors extraordinarily inviting. After I had written for two or
three hours, I found myself walking—and chuckling—up the path through
the birches to Cornelia’s place. Under the hemlocks near the house,
I passed Dorothy, in white tennis-attire with a sketchy sweater the
color of California poppies, curled up in a hammock with a book. A
young girl alone fills me with awe, like a cardinal building a nest;
and I always try to slip past without disturbance—I feel that her
mind must be occupied with something beautiful.
“What are you reading?” I called by way of greeting.
“I’m not reading,” she replied, “I’m waiting for the young man that
mother likes to have me play tennis with.”
With an additional chuckle, I proceeded to the front of the house. My
original merriment had been occasioned by two letters, in the morning
mail, from correspondents at large who desired me to inform them
whether Cornelia was “real.” I was also wondering how much of these
letters I could discreetly disclose to her.
She met me on the threshold of the wide verandah, standing for an
instant tiptoe in a practicable yet perfect sylvan costume, and
framed between two tall Chinese vases of wild tiger-lilies, which
made a little pattern with the glints in her hair and the knot of
soft flame at her breast.
“Let’s walk!” she said.
“Let’s,” I replied; and we struck briskly into the abandoned road
which runs, carpeted with bindweed and bittersweet, for miles and
miles skirting the forest, with only a thin curtain of young silver
poplars and birches between it and the lake. Cornelia is a light,
crisp-footed walker,—at her gayest walking, and good for long
distances,—my only complaint being that she has forgotten how to
loiter. She seems rather bent upon reaching the _terminus ad quem_
than careful to let me fall a step to the rear, where I may consider
with more detachment how, like a dryad, she expresses and completes
the woodland vista.
“I had a letter this morning,” I began, “from an unknown lady. It
would amuse you.”
“Would it indeed?” said Cornelia, moving swiftly forward and at the
same time calling my attention to the twittering brown flutter of a
tree full of cedar-wings.
“Yes,” I insisted, “I’m sure it’s as interesting as bird study.
This lady doubts your existence. Listen to this.” I pulled forth a
delicately tinted letter with a faint scent which died among the
pungent fresh odors of the rain-washed air. “‘Tell me,’ she writes,
‘whether Cornelia is real. If she is, I hope you are not in love
with her. She is the feminine of Sir Austin Feverel. She has no
heart. She is just unfaltering correctness. As a girl, I fancy, she
folded her still hands in her lap and calmly waited till her family
had consulted the bankers and the genealogists before she decided
to care for the man she married. As a woman, she wishes to inspect
and authorize every passion before she allows it to peep. I pity her
children. She has never done a thing in her life merely because for
one rapturous hour it seemed the most desirable thing in the wide
world to do. I should hate her.’”
Cornelia brushed me sidelong with the sweep of her gray eyes, of
which the effect, when one catches it so, is like that of the cool
rays of a May sun bent to a focus under a burning-glass. But she
only said, “What queer correspondents you have! And what a charming
impression of me you have given them! Am I as hateful as that?”
It isn’t difficult to say complimentary things to Cornelia. The
difficulty is not to say them. But I make it a practice not to answer
rhetorical questions. They divert one from one’s point. “Please
remember,” I said, carving my accents on the air with my crabtree
stick and looking straight ahead, “please remember that this is
not my portrait of you, but only the comment of one woman upon the
image of another woman reflected in the eyes of a man who has worn
spectacles for many years. But I have another letter—from a novelist;
he has a quite different theory of you.”
“Is it nice?” asked Cornelia, with a demipirouette and the
instinctive capricious smile of a very pretty woman about to step
before a mirror. “You should tell me something very nice to offset
the spitefulness of that horrid person. But what a silly question!
Your letter is from a novelist; so of course it isn’t nice. Is it?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m afraid it isn’t nice—in your sense of the
word; but it is interesting—in my sense of the word. I call a thing
interesting, you see, when it seems to be earnestly pointing in the
direction where truth, like a rabbit, has just disappeared in the
bushes. Now, this novelist belongs to the large and productive group
of hunters who are leaving the highroad to pursue truth into the
underbrush. His theory of you is not a personal reflection upon you;
it is only part of his general theory of society and human nature.”
“Bah! bah! bah!” Cornelia exclaimed. “I’m sick of human nature—their
theories of it, I mean. I love people, but I hate what our current
writers say about them. Life is so much more decent, when one knows
how to live and whom to live with, than any of our novelists will
admit. I have the same feeling in the theatre. I go to a play and see
nothing in it that can compare with the quality of real experience—if
one has any taste and discrimination. But tell me, now, what does
this dreadful creature say about me?”
“Well, I’ll take the risk,” I said, “since you have the courage or
the curiosity to insist on it.” I pulled out the second letter.
“What he says is this: ‘I am afraid your Cornelia is not real. For
me, at any rate, she doesn’t exist. She isn’t elemental. She isn’t
spontaneous. She strikes me as a theoretical construction to please
a Victorian grandmother. Or perhaps I had better call her an old
bachelor’s pipe dream of a lady. One can’t write modern fiction
from that point of view. It’s insubstantial. We realists have been
demonstrating now for years that Judith O’Grady and the Colonel’s
lady are very much alike beneath the skin. We have destroyed
the legend of the lady, and we have destroyed the legend of the
gentleman. We have put them out of their misery: they don’t exist any
more. We’re just men and women together. If you don’t know Cornelia
as a wife, you don’t know her—you don’t know her as a realist. Women
are not like her—not inside. Go beneath the surface, and you’ll find
the Judith O’Grady in Cornelia.’”
“What nonsense!” cried Cornelia. “What perfect nonsense! Give it to
me.” And almost snatching the letter from my hand, she tore it into
fine shreds, and tossed it showering into a wild currant bush.
III
PREREQUISITES OF A DECENT MARRIAGE
“Don’t you see,” she continued, as we came over the brow of a little
hill, “why I can’t have Dorothy reading these current novels? I
don’t wish her to be what this creature calls ‘elemental’ and
‘spontaneous.’ I wish her to be civilized and rational—and not a
well-dressed little savage, ready to act at once on whatever passion
or fancy or circumstances put into her head. I wish her to associate
with people who are rational and civilized, and, when she marries,
I wish her to marry a man who is civilized and rational. Do you
know, that in the course of the last year I have met just one man
in fiction who seems to have retained elements of the ideas of a
gentleman,—or rather, one man and his father,—I mean the hero of
Struthers Burt’s _The Interpreter’s House_. As for Mr. Burt’s women,
they are almost as uncivilized as anybody’s.”
“Isn’t there a season of life,” I suggested, “in which almost
everyone has some uncivilized promptings?”
“Is there a season in life,” countered Cornelia, “when a properly
trained person cannot present at least the appearance of discretion?”
“My dear Cornelia,” I said, “do you ever glance through those columns
in our great national fireside magazines, in which wise old editors
converse with their contributors and advise young girls how to catch
a man?”
Cornelia smiled, and then abruptly became very firm and grave. “That
is it,” she said. “That is exactly it—‘how to catch a man’! And the
dreadful thing is that the tone of our entire popular discussion and
our popular literature is just about at that level—as if the mere
possession of anything in the shape of a man were so unquestionably
desirable that no scruple must be raised regarding his family and
social position, his religion and principles of personal conduct, his
property and prospects and professional standing. We are becoming
absurd in our carelessness about such matters.”
“But that,” I protested, “is just what makes the beauty of life in
America.”
“That,” said Cornelia, “is what makes American life so ugly—no
respect for any of the things that make people respectable, no sense
for the substantial basis of social distinctions, no regard for the
hedges and barriers behind which one tries to cultivate the flowers
of a finer garden.”
“That,” I said, “is the really decisive evidence of our freedom from
snobbishness.”
“It is the decisive evidence,” said Cornelia, “of our deficiency in
taste.”
“You lack patience,” I persisted. “It is the new social wisdom of
democracy.”
“It is the new social idiocy of democracy,” she replied; “and let
me assure you there is none of it in my house. If I lack patience,
I possess some experience. I was taught by my mother to be kind and
considerate to servants—my old nurse loved me like a daughter. And I
was taught at home and in church to be charitable to poor people and
ignorant people and people without advantages and without manners.
But I was also brought up to believe that a nice girl had better be
dead than form a sentimental relationship with one who was not in her
class—not a gentleman.”
“Don’t you think that is—a rather silly and outworn prejudice?” I
ventured.
“I certainly do not,” she replied. “I think the salvation of a girl
is her pride—legitimate pride in her family, her position, her
connections. I have conscientiously striven to train my daughter
to feel that, so far as her personal fortunes are concerned, common
people—that is, vulgar ordinary people—simply are not in the world.
Call it snobbishness, if you like; I am proud of it.”
“But Cornelia,” I said, “can’t you concede that in the relation we
are discussing, there is something more elemental and imperative than
can be governed by such considerations as you put foremost?”
“Yes—to the sense of animals and savages. Yes—to the sense of
vulgar and ignorant people. To the sense of what my mother used to
call gentlefolk—emphatically, No. To them, there can be nothing
more elemental and imperative than just those considerations which
distinguish them from the ignorant and the vulgar.”
“You yourself have half apologized for the old word, ‘gentlefolk,’”
I nagged. “Please tell me what gentlefolk were, or rather, what a
gentleman is. Must he belong to the Church and be a member of the
militia? For how many generations must he be able to trace his
family? How much money must he have in the bank? How much of the
Decalogue and how many rules for perfect behavior may he break in a
day, without losing caste? Are you quite clear about all this?”
“You have a very irritating way,” said Cornelia, “of trying to
make the most sensible and obvious positions absurd to maintain.
But you know I am right. You know that there is nothing absurd in
being conscious of the claims of the Church and the State and the
established system of morals and manners. You know there is nothing
absurd in being conscious of the significance of money in enabling
one to take and maintain a position of dignity and influence. A man
has no dignity nor influence until he enters relations with the
instituted and continuing forms of society. And though silly little
girls may think they could spend a happy lifetime ‘traipsing’ after a
gipsy minstrel, a wife knows better. Every married woman knows that a
husband without dignity or influence is a perpetual humiliation.”
“Very possibly,” I said; “but you were going to define a gentleman.”
“Why, a gentleman,” said Cornelia, “is a man so well bred and so
intelligent that he knows what I have just been saying, without being
told; consequently he doesn’t ask a nice girl to marry him if he is
aware that he can offer her nothing but perpetual humiliation. A
gentleman is a man whose character has been formed by the standards
of civilized and rational people. To him these considerations are so
elementary and so familiar that he acts upon them spontaneously.”
“Then you would admit,” I suggested, a little petulantly, “that what
a man is, _after_ he is a vestryman, an officer in the militia, and a
property-holder, may have a certain remote bearing on—on the felicity
of a marriage, if you think that of any importance?”
“Of course I think that of importance,” responded Cornelia. “Don’t
be foolish. I am discussing the conditions in which felicity begins
to be possible. You recall what Henry James says so beautifully:
‘The object of money is to enable one to forget it.’ In the whole
course of my life, I believe I was never before hectored into saying
so flatly what the prerequisites of a decent marriage are. But you
and your novelist friends—you realists, as you call yourselves—have
filled the world with the glorification of merely instinctive and
utterly irrational ‘matings,’ or with childish sentimentality about
them; so that now, when I talk with Dorothy about suitable and
unsuitable marriages, I find myself obliged to reconstruct for her
the very rudiments of common-sense.”
I do not consider Cornelia subtle, but sometimes she says the same
things that she would say if she were subtle. However, if I was
being instructed over the head of her daughter, I did not propose to
acknowledge it. “My dear Cornelia,” I remonstrated, “do you forget
that I am not Dorothy?”
“No,” she said, “but I often think you are just as sentimental.”
IV
CORNELIA APPRECIATES HER HUSBAND
The old road dips here into a hollow, where an extensive thicket
of wild roses encroaches upon it and diminishes it to a narrow and
thorny footpath. We picked our way through it single-file and in
silence. Cornelia, emerging some steps ahead, turned and waited,
waist-high behind the briars, smiling—with a rose in her hand and its
hue in her face. Suddenly she seemed a long way off—twenty years off.
The breeze had brought youth into her eyes if not into her mind. She
was very lovely, and I wished the wind might have loosened a wisp—why
couldn’t it?—of her sunlit hair; but that was too much for the wind.
Her own arrangements had been complete.
She fixed the rose in my coat.
“Cornelia,” I said, as we footed it again together over the vivid
green gloss of dewberry leaves, “You remind me of an old sweetheart
of the seventeenth century—who also married a diplomat. I mean
Dorothy Osborne. When Temple was courting her, she wrote to him, oh
quite delicious letters—one in particular, in which she says she has
been crying over the story of Baucis and Philemon. ‘Methinks,’ she
says, ‘they were the perfectest characters of a contented marriage,
where piety and love were all their wealth, and in their poverty
feasted the gods when rich men shut them out.’ But in that identical
letter she warns her lover that ‘_this is the world_; would you and I
were out on’t!’ And in the next letter she derides the foolish young
people who marry for love, and pointedly reminds poor Temple that
all the world must be informed ‘what fortune you have, and upon what
terms I marry you—that both may not be made to appear ten times worse
than they are.’”
“Yes—yes; I remember,” Cornelia said, with—I thought—a faint note of
reverie. “Love and wit met in that encounter, and both came away much
improved. I must give that book to my Dorothy. She was a sensible
girl—Dorothy Osborne was a very sensible girl. It is a book that will
help a young girl to understand that she needn’t be an idiot.”
“At heart,” I said, “even the sweetest of women are as hard as nails,
aren’t they?”
“Someone has to be,” said Cornelia.
“You mean,” I interpreted, “if the young lovers aren’t to make fools
of themselves.”
“Yes,” she said, “or old ones, either.”
“H’m,” I resumed; “what I was getting at was this: when I was a
young fellow, with even less experience than I have now, I used
rather to revel in reading tragedies and tales of dismally bitter and
disillusioned men. All young fellows do. I suppose it intensifies the
sense of their own existence. In the presence of dark and disastrous
things—sin, crime, murder for love, and so on—they persuade
themselves that they are drawing close to the ‘throbbing heart of
reality.’”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “you used to like tragedy.”
“But now,” I said, “I am following an entirely different clue. I have
a theory that the only matter that is really worth investigating is
happiness. And so I haunt the trails of people who are reputed to be
happy, or who act as if they were happy; and I pester them for their
secrets.”
“An odious habit,” she said. “Besides, you won’t learn anything.”
“Cornelia,” I continued,—not solemnly, you understand, but with my
lightest touch,—“are you as entirely happy as we all think you are?”
“You don’t imagine that I should tell you if I were not, do you?” she
said—this also with the light touch. “Of course I am!”
“Then I suppose that if I asked you to outline the personal
characteristics of, let us say, the sort of man one’s daughter should
choose in order to have a high prospect of a happy marriage—why, then
you would just hand me back a quick sketch of His Excellency, your
husband, wouldn’t you?”
“Of course I should,” she replied without hesitation. “I am proud
of Oliver. He has made a place for himself in public life. Men like
him—he has hosts of men friends; and his relatives are all suitable
people. He has been able to provide amply and even lavishly for the
comfort of his family, and has given us the advantage of years of
foreign travel and residence. He cares a good deal for appearances;
but so do I. He likes to live expensively; but he knows how to live.
And he is never, like so many men with careers, too busy to live or
to let other people live unless they can be swept into the stream
of the monster’s ambition. He is never too busy to enjoy what he is
doing.”
“Astonishing virtue, in the circumstances!” groaned my envy.
“And then he is generous to us all—and reasonably tolerant, and
really kind-hearted and sympathetic with people that he likes; and he
and the children positively adore one another. I like that in him.
His temper has its stormy seasons, but for the most part it is gay;
and even when he is very angry, he is rather entertaining. He has so
much humor that he seldom bores himself, and so much intelligence
that he seldom bores anyone else. Everything in the world and at home
seems to interest him vividly. He thinks of something new to do or
to say every morning of his life. Whatever man or woman he meets,
seems to be the one person in the world that he was hoping to meet
at that moment; but I think he actually doesn’t care very much for
women, except in their purely decorative aspects. Sometimes he is a
little exacting, but he is generally appreciative; and he has very,
very nice ways of remembering birthdays and anniversaries. And then,
in tight places he always does the right thing; in a crisis, one can
rely on him.”
“Cornelia,” I said, clipping a row of flame-weed with my stick, as we
quickened our pace, “I have just passed through a terrible minute.
You know that Oliver is the only man in the world that I envy. I have
been checking off each trait of his against my own, and the only
trait that I have in common with this happiness-producing paragon is
that my temper, too, has ‘stormy seasons.’”
“That’s too bad,” Cornelia said maliciously, “for I don’t consider
Oliver’s temper his best trait.”
“No, nor do I; you omitted the finest virtue of the perfect American
husband. What I admire most of all in Oliver is his sending you into
the country for the summer—and his sublime confidence that he will
get you back again in the fall.”
“The quiet is nice here, isn’t it?” she said; “but hadn’t we better
turn about? The sun is slipping into that indigo cloud-bank.”
V
WE DISCUSS THE INNER LIFE
We plunged over the ridge by a steep path to the lake, in order to
make the short return by the shore. The wind was now blowing hard
and the waves running high. I began to feel like taking it easy, but
Cornelia is indefatigable. She drew up her shoulders, threw back
her head, drew a deep breath, and went cutting into the wind like a
gallant yacht.
“Oh let’s slow down a bit,” I called. “I’ve only just begun to
understand something. Something very important about happiness.
It flashed into my mind—literally flashed—as you struck that
Samothracian pace northward.”
“If it’s as important as that—” she said, relenting a little in her
stride. “But don’t you like to walk fast? Nothing makes me so happy.”
“I have a theory,” I said. “One can’t walk fast when one has a
theory. It’s a theory for which you are partly, perhaps mainly,
responsible.”
“Then it isn’t horrid, is it?”
“Oh no! It is very nice indeed. But even now, while we delay, it
has grown into three theories. In the first place, there are no
perfect husbands, and there is probably only one perfect wife. In the
second place, happiness is in neither wives nor husbands, but only
in the relation between. In the third place, people who are unhappy
in marriage are so, usually, because they don’t know how to give
themselves to each other. In the fourth place,—it’s four now,—that
unhappy ignorance is chiefly due to erroneous conceptions of the
self.”
“Just what do you mean by the self?” she said. “My metaphysical
brains are weak.”
“Well, the traditional, romantic, and generally popular conception
is, that the self is a very deep and precious mystery of ‘the buried
life,’ an elusive being hidden away inside,—always inside,—in a
secret garden of the personality, where it murmurs to itself the most
delightful and ineffable secrets, which can be communicated to any
other self only in a mystical physical fusion of selves—or confusion
of selves.”
“Yes,” said Cornelia, “I understand that. It is something like the
religious or sacramental theory of marriage, isn’t it?”
“Something like some people’s notion of it,” I replied. “But please
follow this argument. Under the illusion that the self is such a
being, and only so to be come at, romantic lovers fret themselves to
a fever, and decadent heroes and heroines tear each other to bits,
and ignorant contemporary husbands and wives separate with bitter
recriminations, each charging that the mysteriously rewarding self
sought in the other was not to be found.”
“Well?”
“Well, the reason it was not found is that it was not there. There is
no such secret garden; there is no such mysterious self to reward the
mystics of the romantic quest.”
“Don’t you think so?”