passed the examinations, and she thought about it more or less. But
finally she came out instead. She may go yet. I don’t know. She still
talks to her father about it, and meanwhile she takes courses with
learned women about art and such things, and does something at music.
And she goes to dances a little, and dines out a little, and slums a
little, and organizes charity a little.”
“Does she play with the boys?”
“A very little. The young men don’t seem to be the absorbing interest
they were when I was young. But I suppose that is more a change in
human nature. New York has come to be a good deal of a street-car, with
people crowding in and out all the time, and the conductor perpetually
calling out, ‘Please move up there in front!’ Girls and young men don’t
meet here familiarly any more. I don’t know how they ever see enough of
one another to get married unless they meet in the summer somewhere.
New York girls seem mostly to marry men they meet on steamers,
nowadays.”
“I understand,” said the Major, “that our population is now divided
into those who travel and those who stay at home. Those who travel
meet, especially on steamers where they are cooped up together with
a week of idle time on their hands and are liable to develop mutual
appreciations. Those who don’t travel also meet more or less, and some
of them seem to marry. There were you and Cordelia, Peregrine; you were
not a traveler, yet you got married somehow.”
“Oh yes,” said I. “I had to. There was nothing else that I wanted to do
that was compatible with earning a living. I never traveled. I never
could; but Cordelia traveled plenty.”
“To be sure,” put in Mrs. Van Pelt, “they can travel if they don’t go
to college. It doesn’t cost much more, and they have the time. And
they do travel. Also they visit about with their school friends, and
find their way about Boston and Philadelphia and Washington and other
places more civilized than this, and I have known of girls who went to
visit in St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul, which was interesting and
enlarging to the mind, though not so necessary perhaps as though we did
not have the finished products of those cities brought daily to our
doors, and could not inspect them and the rest of the United States any
day on Fifth Avenue, or by walking through the Waldorf-Astoria or the
Plaza Hotel, or at home, or out at dinner--and I beg you to recognize,
Mrs. Lamson, that I remember that we borrowed you from Seattle, and
you and your husband, Mrs. Butler, from Buffalo, and that I, who was
brought here from Baltimore, speak humbly and with great respect of
all our Western cities. But send your girl to college, and then she is
like a butterfly pinned to a card. Can’t visit, can’t travel, can’t
beguile her father, can’t console her mother, can’t take her brother to
dances, can’t pay calls, lost to earth, learning the family connections
of mollusks--what is a mollusk?--and the other unusable things that
erudite people have put into tiresome books. And yet I don’t doubt that
Maria’s father will send her to college if she wants to go.”
Mr. Van Pelt, farther down the table, seeing that his wife had the
floor, had lent an ear to her deliverance. “Well,” said he, “what can
you do? Four years is only four years, and a girl in these days can
afford to spend it in getting something definite and lasting, if only
she gets it. I only know this game of being a girl by observation. I
have never played at it. But my wife knows it as a player, and what
she perceives in it by experience and instinct always outweighs my
theories in my own judgment. She decides these matters except in so
far as Maria decides them for herself, which is a good ways. My wife is
uncertain about the good of girls’ colleges because she never went to
one. They’re very new. They didn’t prevail so much in her educational
period as they do now. They must be excellent for girls whose mothers
are desperate or frivolous characters, from whom they need to be
separated. All the institutions are valuable in separating children
with possibilities from impossible parents. But where the parents
are not impossible, of course the separation involves loss. We feel
as to boys that the gain pretty certainly counterbalances it. But we
feel that girls do well to form the habit of living at home, which is
something that takes practice, and even prayers, if you’re going to do
it as you should. If Maria goes to college, I’m for having her sleep
at home, where I can see her at dinner. Though whether that’s right
or not, I don’t know. I don’t expect to give Maria more than a very
imperfect steer in this life anyhow. That’s all I got; all my wife
got; all my father and mother got. But I don’t mind taking a chance
if it looks good, and the fact that college does not fit conveniently
into the social machinery that has been devised for the development
of girls in New York does not appall me. The machinery exists for the
benefit of the girls, not the girls for the machinery. What we are
after is to train fine women. You don’t do it by wholesale processes.
It is hard work, anyhow, and what suits one doesn’t suit another. It
is with a girl, I take it, as it is with a boy. The facts they get in
college they mostly lose, but the minds of some of them expand in the
process of getting facts, and gain scope and power, and the ability to
understand things, and increased interest in life, and capacity. Any
way, so that the girls get their own.”
“If we’ve all got to vote presently,” said Mrs. Brace, “no doubt the
girls will have to go to college. I’m told we’re not constitutional in
our political remedies.”
“As to votes,” said the Major, “it’s a case of half-knowledge is a
dangerous thing. The most able women that I happen to know, the most
thoroughly trained and schooled in hard mental work, those that seem to
me the deepest thinkers, don’t want votes for women. Of course college
at its best is only a step, but it is a step toward sound thinking. I
should be inclined to argue that college for a girl was a step toward
giving her such a grasp upon human affairs and the conditions of life
as would incline her to leave votes where they are, and spend her
strength in other forms of expression. So if Maria sends herself to
college, Van Pelt, it may be a process in the making of a really able
anti-suffragist who will understand herself, and other women and men,
and can sift the chaff out of an argument. If the suffragists are to
be beaten they will be beaten by the rest of women--those who have
found their vocation and are happy in it, those who are busy, at least,
whether happy or not, and cannot be harangued into excitement about
politics, and those of first-rate mental powers and deep experience,
who can turn the whole matter over in their minds and conclude that
woman suffrage would not help society. At any rate, woman suffrage or
not, the way out lies in the direction of more power in the human mind,
male and female, and not in less.”
We males continued to discuss this subject when the ladies had gone
out and we went into the Major’s library to burn tobacco. They set
upon me as the latest transplantation from the college nursery into
the garden of actual life, and demanded to know what I had got out
of college. I said that for one thing I had got an acquaintance with
several hundred men of about my own age, a good many of them now living
in New York and the rest scattered variously about the country. Some
of these men I knew intimately. All of them I knew well enough to have
views about their qualities, and what I knew of them helped me to
know other men, and gave me a measure which helped me to estimate men
in general. I said that the way to know pictures was to be where you
could see pictures, that the way to know men was, doubtless, to live
with them and look them over, and that college--a big college--was a
very convenient place to view a collection of young men, and learn
to know the species. I said I didn’t think any other thing we got in
college was so important as that, because the other things you might
learn in a big college could be learned anywhere if you took the
necessary time and put in the necessary work. But the beauty about
college was that you had the time there to add to knowledge in all
the ways, to learn the men and also to inspect the books and examine
the mental secretions of the professors, and that with reasonable
gumption and diligence you could do it all. As to that end of it I
quoted Tomlinson, who dined with us the other night. He is a still
more recent college product than I am, and is still immersed in law
studies. We got to talking college and what we thought it had done
for us, and he said, as I remember, that he could hardly recall a
fact that he had learned in college, but still he thought he had got
great good out of it. When he was an undergraduate, he said, he was
interested mostly in history, government, and economics. When he got
out, his tastes entirely changed, and he got interested in literature
and philosophy. “Nowadays,” said he, “I look forward to Sunday with the
utmost impatience, and when it comes round I put it in with Spencer,
Huxley, and Emerson. I am getting to be an authority on biology, I tell
you, and wrestle with _First Principles_ in a way to make my law-books
jealous.”
They were quite interested in Tomlinson. The Major said he loved to see
a boy come out of college with a desire to know something. “Now that
boy,” said he, “is really interested in what is going on, and wants
to know why. It’s delightful. He’s got the inquiring mind, and, you
see, college has developed it. Perhaps it would have developed anyhow,
but at least the environment was favorable. It’s a mighty inquisitive
mind that develops on general lines if it is put hard into the game
of money-grubbing at seventeen. And I don’t know that the game of
‘society’ is so much better for girls, though it is better in this:
that its more strenuous phase doesn’t last long, and after that a girl
who has not yet formed an attachment has a great deal more leisure
than a boy who is tied up to a job. We should recognize that ‘society’
is intended to give to girls that acquaintance with people, and the
opportunities to observe them and handle them, that Jesup, here, values
so much in college. Only ‘society’ does not include the systematic
cultivation of recorded knowledge which the colleges still exact. If
your Maria, now, Van Pelt, could supplement her social experiments with
such fruits of college learning as that young Tomlinson reports, she’d
be ahead on it. Don’t you think so? She’d be a more interesting woman,
and have a livelier interest in life, and take hold of things more
intelligently, and put in her spare time to better purpose, and have
more fun. It is a great thing, it really is a great thing, to get the
young started up the tree of knowledge; to get them to want to know,
and start them climbing.”
“I agree with you, Major,” said Mr. Van Pelt. “I quite agree with you.
But Tomlinson’s a boy and Maria’s a girl. Is that going to make a
difference? Evidently Tomlinson’s not going to let the trees obstruct
his view of the forest. He seems to be after knowledge because it will
help him to understand life. That’s all the good there is in knowledge.
Now I see women who seem to claw after knowledge as though it were a
sunburst, or some such embellishment that adorned them to good purpose.
I see their minds caked up with it, so that they don’t work well. Some
of the learned ladies are tiresome, just as some of the learned men
are. They are not tiresome because they know too much, but because they
lack the instinct that should tell them how to be interesting. You know
a lively retail shop with a good show-window is always more interesting
than a storage warehouse, no matter what treasures the warehouse may
contain. I was saying the other day that Mrs. Jameson, the professor’s
wife, was such a charming lady, and a very accomplished woman who heard
me, said, ‘Oh yes; but she doesn’t know English literature.’ What odds
whether she knows English literature or not if she is a charming lady?
As much English literature as will make her lovelier and better able
to express herself and more interesting and wiser is a good thing, and
more than that is of very secondary importance except to a specialist.
But that other lady who did know English literature like a specialist
spoke of Mrs. Jameson’s defective hold on it very much as though it
were an absent sunburst or an unbecoming gown. As for Maria, I should
hate to spoil a woman to make a scholar. But on the other hand, I
should hate to stunt a woman to make a pretty lady.”
The Major said that in Maria’s case he would rather take the first
chance than the second. “But if you will encourage Maria to come around
here to dinner, Van Pelt,” he said, “I’ll get Jesup to catch that young
Tomlinson person, and we will examine his mind. Perhaps Maria may be
interested to look into it, and if she is, I should love to see her
try. I don’t know why, but when I hear of girls who are disposed to
use their heads to think with, and who think it would be nice to know
what’s doing, I always have irresistible impulses to abet them. They
may sometime--yes, any time--think out and disclose such interesting
things. For, after all, women are women, and we men all grope and want
to know when we speculate about them.”
He got up, went to a table drawer, and got out a little paper, which he
gave me, saying “Here’s a tract for you, Peregrine,” and then we went
back to the ladies.
When Cordelia and I got home that night, and had viewed, approved, and
tucked in our slumbering son, Samuel, and had discussed the company and
their discourse, I brought out the Major’s tract and read it to her, to
wit:
“What are regarded as the great prizes of life--fame, money, and such
showy things--are nearly all things geared to the powers of men. It is
easy to measure the successes of men. They stand out in plain sight to
be weighed and examined.
“But the successes of most of the successful women are much
less tangible. As a rule they are contributions to life as it
passes--influence, care, nurture, direction, companionship; valuables
of the highest order, but which finally appear, not as properties of
the woman from whom they proceeded, but of the men or the children who
received them, and the families and communities that they have blessed.
“The evidences of the success of men stand on pedestals and hang on
walls and are recorded in books and occupy safe-deposit boxes in bank
vaults. They stretch across the country in the form of steel rails or
copper wires, or stand as buildings in stone and steel. On every one of
them is the woman’s hand. In every one of them she has had her share.
There is no success of any kind, no power, no progress, which is not
half hers. But ordinarily she does not much appear; not, at least,
in a degree at all commensurate with her importance. Her work is not
expressed--not much--in things. It is made flesh.
“Is that unjust to her? Is it unfair that man should seem to outdo her?
“Who shall say what is fair and what not in the management of this
universe? We flatter ourselves with the idea that the Almighty has
chosen to express Himself in mankind. Admitting that, it is a daring
critic who will assert that woman is disparaged because it is allotted
to her to express herself in like fashion.”
VIII
MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE
How am I to get a garden for Cordelia? I love so to see her in a
garden. They’re fine for women. I like them myself, but the calls
of the industry I pursue below Canal Street distract me from
floriculture and personal pokings in the earth. I don’t even _plan_
garden in any detail, which is partly, of course, because we have
no actual garden possibilities yet to plan, though we still aspire
to remote rhododendrons. But I get perceptible refreshment out of
flower-beds, and very innocent and healing joys in the colors and
texture and designs of flowers and the various patterns of millinery
they affect. They are the great natural argument for art and beauty;
immensely consoling and inspiring both for what they are and for what
they intimate. Admiring them, even the imperfectly Scriptural, like
me, revert instinctively to Scripture and to consideration of the
lilies, that toil not, neither spin, and yet are in the front of the
competition for looks, and fit for their beauty’s sake to reproach the
doubts of them of little faith. Certainly the Creator did not get up
flowers for nothing.
We must have a garden, if only for its pious uses, but for Cordelia
it has admirable physical and mental uses besides. It gives her all
the exercises--of mind, body, and spirit. Detached as she is from the
soil she sprang from, in her mother’s garden she gets personally back
to earth, grubbing in it with trowels and like implements, with beads
on her brow and blisters and mosquito bites wherever they happen to
come, but with a zest and an enjoyment that comes near to passion.
Our parents, happily, have pretty good gardens, and all the spring we
have been improving the week-ends by getting near to nature on the
paternal suburban reservations. This being Samuel’s first spring, he
has viewed it mostly from a perambulator, but, so seen, it has been
profitable to him, and he has regarded its advances with perceptible
approval, especially when it has been warm enough, and dry enough, for
him to sleep informally out-of-doors. No doubt the modern theory is
sound that it is never too cold or too wet to sleep out-of-doors, but
Samuel, being naturally robust, has never had to be absolutely modern
in his observances. I leave it to any fair person if it is tolerable
to think of his growing up without close and long association with the
green-and-brown earth? Yet children do it by the hundred thousand in
New York, and a fair proportion of them grow up stronger and better
than a considerable proportion of the country-bred children. There
are children, I am told, whom the city agrees with, and others--a
minority--who suffer from the nervous tension of it. It is agreed, I
suppose, that all children are better off out of town in summer, but so
are grown people, provided they go to a healthier place and can find
fit employments, or make them for themselves. But the hardy children,
like the hardy grown-ups, seem to get along in town or out. I find that
in June the country air begins to taste different from the town air,
and when I get off the cars in the rural districts I fill my lungs with
great gulps of it, to the easement of my feelings.
Bless me, how much we want, and how much it seems to cost to get it!
Everybody wants a lot nowadays, and everybody, except the seriously
opulent, seems to find the cost excessive. I suppose everybody wants
for his child what Cordelia and I want for Samuel. Everybody seems to
want to live some sort of a life that’s worth living, and to get the
price of it somehow. It is a large contract for society to meet these
natural and reasonable desires; no wonder the world’s machinery groans
so, and that strikes and perplexities and trust trials so much abound,
and that so much talk is in the air about the right of the people to
rule. But ruling is a skilled job, and though it is none too well
done, and never has been, the notion that “the people” are first-class
experts at it who are kept out of power by interlopers seems to me
more or less humorous. And so is the notion that we “people” have any
great eagerness to rule. We haven’t. That’s one trouble. Almost all of
us want to go about our business and procure some of the ameliorations
of existence. Ruling is hard work and small pay. We want some one else
to do it, if possible; some one who has a call and feels that he has
a talent for government. These gentlemen who talk about the people
ruling are usually gentlemen who have inward admonitions that they
possess governmental talent. We choose between them, and to that extent
we rule, and have been ruling for some time, and will rule, I guess,
for some time to come.
Cordelia and I would like to vote for more room in our flat. It’s too
tight. Now, with Samuel and his belongings to provide for, we haven’t
room to hang up and put away our things. We want a larger apartment,
cheaper food, especially milk, reduction in the price of clothes,
lower servants’ wages--more, generally, for our money. But I don’t
know just how to vote for these things without running up against
the reasonable needs of other people. All the measures I would favor
as suitable to make my earnings go further seem constituted to make
somebody else’s earnings less. That wouldn’t hinder me from voting to
reduce the tariff, because I think it ought to be reduced, but I don’t
want to vote any less wages for Matilda Finn. Demand and taxation fix
rents; how am I going to vote them cheaper? If the Meat Trust makes
meat unduly dear, I’m against it; but I am not at all sure that it
does. If the excessive multiplication of grocers makes potatoes high,
it is a pity, but how am I going to vote against it? I can vote, when
the chance comes, for the best city government that is offered, and
the best obtainable bargain about public utilities, and supervision
of milk, and such things; and I can vote for tariff reform, and trust
regulation, and conservation in so far as those desirables are affected
by retaining or dismissing the present administrators of the Federal
government; but after I have voted all I can--and expressed my primary
preference, and initiated and recalled and referended, if those
privileges are offered me--it will still remain undoubtedly that if I
want more closet-room for Cordelia and a continuing residence in town
and a garden somewhere, I’ve got to get in more money. So I’m in just
the same case as the mill-hands and the miners and everybody else who
has been on a strike lately, except that I haven’t got to strike unless
I want to, and I sha’n’t want to until I have an offer of something
better than I’ve got now.
It makes me ashamed to keep wanting more money, even though the
mill-hands and miners and the rest feel just as I do about it. But,
after all, that want is the great spur of civilization. If most of
us didn’t want more closet-room, and a garden, and a roof-garden
sleeping-apartment for Samuel, and a little larger dinner-parties
than we can give as it is and more of them, and food, clothes,
education, leisure, travel, automobiles, and all the other necessaries
and unnecessaries, I suppose all progress would slacken. The whole
apparatus of civilization seems to be geared to these more or less
humble human desires. Politics is a sort of rash that breaks out on
bodies of men that are tired with too much work, or hungry, or starved
in their spirits, or thwarted in their aspirations, or who need more
closet-room and gardens. The politicians are not rulers, after all;
they are doctors, making diagnoses, and offering prescriptions and
treatments, and taking fees, and flunked a good deal of the time by the
symptoms of the patient. A real cure of human ailments by politics is
inconceivable. There are too many people, and they want more than there
is, and if they were all satisfied for once at a quarter past six,
there would be a lot more of them, and they would have developed a lot
more wants, by seven o’clock. But that only proves that politics is a
continuing job, that never will lapse, and never will be finished so
long as there are folks on the earth.
It is wonderful what is accomplished; how we endure labor, privations,
disappointment, restricted closet-space, and lack of gardens, and go
on comparatively orderly and patient, getting what we can and going
without the rest. Shops are full of goods and the doors open; trains
run, crowds surge here and there, strikers strike and pickets picket,
judges sit, juries find, the polls open and close, and the papers tell
us who was elected. Somehow, in all this muddle, life is fairly safe,
most of the people are fed, babies get attention, the dead are buried,
the processes of existence go on.
The whole of politics seems secondary because the whole material side
of life, even gardens and closet-room, seems secondary. I guess that
is what saves the world alive. There are not enough material things
to satisfy everybody. I doubt indeed if there are enough to satisfy
anybody. But of the things of the mind and of the things of the spirit
there is a boundless supply, and any one who can may help himself.