PART V

IN REVIEW

(London)

I. The Critics 235

II. The Judgment 248

ILLUSTRATIONS

AN AMERICAN ALLEGORY _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

AFTERNOON PARADE ON FIFTH AVENUE 10

A PATCH OF THE CRAZY QUILT 14

“NEW YORK’S FINEST.” 30

AMERICAN WOMAN GOES TO WAR 58

THE TRIUMPHANT “THIRD SEX” TAKES WASHINGTON 66

OPEN-AIR BALL ON THE 14TH JULY 82

L’HEURE DU RENDEZ-VOUS 110

THE SOUL OF OLD SPAIN 173

THE QUEEN OF SPAIN AND PRINCE OF ASTURIAS 184

FAIR ENTHUSIASTS AT THE BULL-FIGHT 190

THE SUPREME MOMENT 192

A TYPICAL POSTURE OF THE SPANISH DANCE 204

THE ROYAL FAMILY OF SPAIN AFTER A CHAPEL SERVICE 210

KING ALFONSO SWEARING-IN RECRUITS, APRIL 13, 1913 212

“THE RESTFUL SWEEP OF PARKS” 235

LONDON: THE EMPIRE CAPITAL 252

THE GREAT ISLAND SITE 256

LINKING THE NEW ERA AND THE OLD 258

PROLOGUE

A play is a play in so much as it furnishes a fragment of actual life.

Being only a fragment, and thus literally torn out of the mass of

life, it is bound to be sketchy; to a certain extent even superficial.

Particularly is this the case where the scene shifts between five

places radically different in elements and ideals. The author can only

present the (to her) most impressive aspects of the several pictures,

trusting to her sincerity to bridge the gaps her enforced brevity must

create. And first she invites you to look at the piece in rehearsal.

I

IN REHEARSAL

(New York)

I

THE CAST

Thanks to the promoters of _opéra bouffe_ we are accustomed as a

universe to screw our eye to a single peep-hole in the curtain that

conceals a nation, and innocently to accept what we see therefrom as

typical of the entire people. Thus England is generally supposed to be

inhabited by a blond youth with a top-hat on the back of his head, and

a large boutonnière overwhelming his morning-coat. He carries a loud

stick, and says “Ah,” and is invariably strolling along Piccadilly.

In France, the youth has grown into a bad, bold man of thirty--a

_boulevardier_, of course--whose features consist of a pair of inky

moustaches and a wicked leer. He sits at a table and drinks absinthe,

and watches the world go by. The world is never by chance engaged

elsewhere; it obligingly continues to go by.

Spain has a rose over her ear, and listens with patience to a perpetual

guitar; Austria forever is waltzing upstairs, while America is known

to be populated by a sandy-haired person of no definite age or

embellishments, who spends his time in the alternate amusements of

tripling his fortune and ejaculating “I guess!” He has a white marble

mansion on Fifth Avenue, and an office in Wall Street, where daily he

corners cotton or sugar or crude oil--as the fancy strikes him. And he

is bounded on every side by sky-scrapers.

Like most widely accepted notions, this is picturesque but untrue. The

Americans of America, or at least the New Yorkers of New York, are not

the handful of men cutting off coupons in mahogany offices “down-town”;

nor the silken, sacheted women gliding in and out of limousines, with

gold purses. They are the swarm of shop-keepers and “specialists,”

mechanics and small retailers, newspaper reporters and petty clerks,

such as flood the Subways and Elevated railways of New York morning

and night; fighting like savages for a seat. They are the army of

tailors’ and shirt-makers’ and milliners’ girls who daily pour through

the cross-streets, to and from their sordid work; they are the palely

determined hordes who batter at the artistic door of the city, and live

on nothing a week. They are the vast troops of creatures born under a

dozen different flags, whom the city has seduced with her golden wand,

whom she has prostituted to her own greed, whom she will shortly fling

away as worthless scrap--and who love her with a passion that is the

root and fibre of their souls.

So much for the actual New Yorkers, as contrasted with the gilded

nonentity of musical comedy and best-selling fiction. As for New York

itself, it has the appearance of behind the scenes at a gigantic

theatre. Coming into the harbour is like entering the house of a

great lady by the back door. Jagged rows of match-like buildings

present their blank rear walls to the river, or form lurid bills of

advertisement for somebody’s pork and beans; huge barns of ferry

terminuses overlap with their galleries the narrow streets beneath;

slim towers shoot up, giddy and dazzling-white, in the midst of grimy

tenements and a hideous black network of elevated railways; the domes

of churches and of pickle factories, the turrets of prisons and of

terra cotta hotels, the electric signs of theatres and of cemetery

companies, are mingled indiscriminately in a vast, hurled-together

heap. While everywhere great piles of stone and steel are dizzily

jutting skyward, ragged and unfinished.

It is plain to be seen that here life is in preparation--a piece in

rehearsal; with the scene-shifters a bit scarce, or untutored in their

business. One has the uncomfortable sensation of having been in too

great haste to call; and so caught the haughty city on her moving-in

day. This breeds humility in the visitor, and indulgence for the poor

lady who is doing her best to set her house to rights. It is a splendid

house, and a distinctly clever lady; and certainly in time they will

adjust themselves to one another and to the world outside. For the

present they loftily enjoy a gorgeous chaos.

Into this the stranger is landed summarily, and with no pause of

railway journey before he attacks the city. London, Paris, Madrid,

may discreetly withdraw a hundred miles or more further from the

impatient foreigner: New York confronts him brusquely on the pier.

And from his peaceful cabin he is plunged into a vortex of hysterical

reunions, rushing porters, lordly customs officials, newspaper men,

express-agents, bootblacks and boys shouting “Tel-egram!” He has been

on the dock only five minutes, when he realizes that the dock itself is

unequivocally, uncompromisingly New York.

Being New York, it has at once all the conveniences and all the

annoyances known to man, there at his elbow. One can talk by long

distance telephone from the pier to any part of the United States; or

one can telegraph a “day letter” or a “night letter” and be sure of its

delivery in any section of the three-thousand mile continent by eight

o’clock next morning. One can check one’s trunks, when they have passed

the customs, direct to one’s residence--whether it be Fifth Avenue,

New York, or Nob Hill, San Francisco; time, distance, the clumsiness

of inanimate things, are dissipated before the eyes of the dazzled

stranger.

On the other hand, before even he has set foot on American soil, he

becomes acquainted with American arrogance, American indifference,

the fantasy of American democracy. The national attitude of

I-am-as-good-as-you-are has been conveyed to him through the surly

answers of the porter, the cheerful familiarity of the customs

examiner, the grinning impudence of the express-man. These excellent

public servants would have the foreigner know once and for all that he

is in a land where all men are indisputably proven free and equal,

every minute. The extremely interesting fact that all men are most

unequal--slaves to their own potentialities--has still to occur to the

American. He is in the stage of doing, not yet of thinking; therefore

he finds disgrace in saying “sir” to another man, but none in showing

him rudeness.

In a civilization like that of America, where the office-boy of today

is the millionaire of tomorrow, and the millionaire of today tomorrow

will be begging a job, there cannot exist the hard and fast lines

which in older worlds definitely fix one man as a gentleman, another

as his servant. Under this management of lightning changes, the most

insignificant of the chorus nurses (and with reason) the belief that

he may be jumped overnight into the leading rôle. There is something

rather fine in the desperate self-confidence of every American in the

ultimate rise of his particular star. Out of it, I believe, grows much

of that feverish activity which the visitor to New York invariably

records among his first impressions. One has barely arrived, and been

whirled from the dock into the roar and rush of Twenty-third Street and

Broadway, when he begins to realize the relentless energy of the place.

The very wind sweeps along the tunnel-like streets, through the rows of

monster buildings, with a speed that takes the breath. In the fiercest

of the gale, at the intersection of the two great thoroughfares of

Fifth Avenue and Broadway, rises the solid, serene bulk of the Flatiron

Building--like a majestic Wingèd Victory breasting the storm. Over to

the right, in Madison Square, Metropolitan Tower rears its disdainful

white loftiness; far above the dusky gold and browns of old Madison

Square Garden; above the dwarfed Manhattan Club, the round Byzantine

dome of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church. But the Flatiron itself

has the proudest site in New York; facing, to the north, on one side

the tangle and turmoil of Broadway--its unceasing whirr of business,

business, business; on the other side, the broad elegance and dignity

of Fifth Avenue, with its impressive cavalcade of mounted police. While

East and West, before this giant building, rush the trams and traffic

of Twenty-third Street; and to the South lie the arches of aristocratic

old Washington Square.

It is as though at this converging point one gathers together all the

outstanding threads in the fabric of the city, to visualize its central

pattern. And the outstanding types of the city here are gathered also.

One sees the ubiquitous “businessman,” in his careful square-shouldered

clothes, hurrying from bus to tram, or tearing down-town in a taxi;

the almost ubiquitous business-woman, trig and quietly self-confident,

on her brisk up-town walk to the office; and the out-of-town woman

“shopper,” with her enormous hand-bag, and the anxious-eyed Hebrew

“importer” (whose sign reads _Maison Marcel_), and his stunted little

errand-girl darting through the maze of traffic like a fish through

well-known waters; the idle young man-about-town, immortalized in the

sock and collar advertisements of every surface car and Subway; and the

equally idle young girl, in her elaborate sameness the prototype of the

same cover of the best magazines: even in one day, there comes to be a

strange familiarity about all these people.

They are peculiar to their own special class, but within that class

they are as like as peas in a pod. They have the same features, wear

the same clothes even to a certain shade, and do the same things in

identically the same day. With all about them shifting, progressing,

alternating from hour to hour, New Yorkers, in themselves, remain

unaltered. Or, if they change, they change together as one creature--be

he millionaire or Hebrew shop-keeper, doctor of divinity or manager of

comic opera. For, of all men under the sun, the New Yorker is a type;

acutely suspicious of and instinctively opposed to anything independent

of the type. Hence, in spite of the vast numbers of different peoples

brought together on Manhattan Island, we find not a community of

Americans growing cosmopolitan, but a community of cosmopolitans forced

to grow New Yorkers. This, under the potent influence of extreme

American adaptability, they do in a remarkably short time; the human

potpourri who five years ago had never seen Manhattan, today being

indistinguishable in the representative city mass.

Walk out Fifth Avenue at the hour of afternoon parade, or along

Broadway on a matinée day: the habitués of the two promenades differ

only in degree. Broadway is blatant. Fifth Avenue is desperately

toned-down. On Broadway, voices and millinery are a few shades more

strident, self-assertion a few shades more arrogant than on the less

ingenuous Avenue. Otherwise, what do you find? The same over-animated

women, the same over-languid young girls; wearing the same velvets and

furs and huge corsage bouquets, and--unhappily--the same pearl powder

and rouge, whether they be sixteen or sixty, married or demoiselle.

Ten years ago New York could boast the loveliest, naturally beautiful

galaxy of young girls in the world; today, since the onslaught of

French fashion and artificiality, this is no longer true. On the other

hand, it is pitiable to see the hard painted lines and fixed smile of

the women of the world in the faces of these girls of seventeen and

eighteen who walk up and down the Avenue day after day to stare and be

stared at with almost the boldness of a boulevard _trotteuse_.

[Illustration:

_Underwood & Underwood_

THE AFTERNOON PARADE ON FIFTH AVENUE]

Foreigners who watch them from club windows write enthusiastic

eulogies in their praise. To me they seem a terrible travesty on all

that youth is meant to be. They take their models from pictures of

French demi-mondaines shown in ultra-daring race costumes, in the

Sunday newspapers; and whom they fondly believe to be great ladies of

society. I had almost said that from head to foot they are victims of

an entirely false conception of beauty and grace; but when it comes to

their feet, they are genuine American, and, so, frank and attractive.

Indeed there is no woman as daintily and appropriately shod as the

American woman, whose trim short skirts betray this pleasant fact with

every step she takes.

Nowhere, however, is appearance and its detail more misrepresentative

than in New York. Strangers exclaim at the opulence of the frocks

and furs displayed by even the average woman. They have no idea that

the average woman lives in a two-by-four hall bedroom--or at best a

three-room flat; and that she has saved and scrimped, or more probably

gone into debt to acquire that one indispensable good costume. Nor

could they imagine that her chief joy in a round of sordid days is

parade in it as one of the luxurious throng that crowd Fifth Avenue and

its adjacent tea-rooms from four till six every afternoon.

Not only the women of Manhattan itself revel in this daily scene; but

their neighbors from Brooklyn, Staten Island, Jersey City and Newark

pour in by the hundreds, from the underground tubes and the ferries

that connect these places with New York. The whole _raison d’être_ of

countless women and girls who live within an hour’s distance of the

city is this everyday excursion to their Mecca: the leisurely stroll up

Fifth Avenue from Twenty-third Street, down from Fifty-ninth; the cup

of tea at one of the rococo hotels along the way. It is a routine of

which they never seem to tire--a monotony always new to them. And the

pathetic part of it is that while they all--the indigent “roomers,” the

anxious suburbanites, and the floating fraction of tourists from the

West and South--fondly imagine they are beholding the Four Hundred of

New York society, they are simply staring at each other!

And accepting each other naïvely at their clothes value. The woman

of the hall bedroom receives the same appreciative glance as the

woman with a bank account of five figures; provided that outwardly

she has achieved the same result. The prime mania of New York is

results--or what appear to be results. Every sky-scraper in itself is

an exclamation-point of accomplishment. And the matter is not how one

accomplishes, but how much; so that the more sluggish European can feel

the minutes being snatched and squeezed by these determined people

round him and made to yield their very utmost before being allowed to

pass into telling hours and days.

With this goes an air of almost offensive competency--an air that is

part of the garments of the true New Yorker; as though he and he alone

can compass the affair towards which he is forever hurrying. There is

about him, always, the piquant insinuation that he is keeping someone

waiting; that he can. I have been guilty of suspecting that this

attitude, together with his painstakingly correct clothes, constitute

the chief elements in the New Yorker’s game of “bluff.” Let him wear

what the ready-made tailor describes as “snappy” clothes, and he is

at once respected as successful. A man may be living on one meal a

day, but if he can contrive a prosperous appearance, together with the

preoccupied air of having more business than he can attend to, he is

in the way of being begged to accept a position, at any moment.

No one is so ready to be “bluffed” as the American who spends his

life “bluffing.” In him are united the extremes of ingenuousness and

shrewdness; so that often through pretending to be something he is

not, he does actually come to be it. A Frenchman or a German or an

Englishman is born a barber; he remains a barber and dies a barber,

like his father and grandfather before him. His one idea is to be the

best barber he can be; to excell every other barber in his street. The

American scorns such lack of “push.” If his father is a barber, he

himself learns barbering only just well enough to make a living while

he looks for a “bigger job.” His mind is not on pleasing his clients,

but on himself--five, ten, twenty years hence.

He sees himself a confidential clerk, then manager’s assistant, then

manager of an independent business--soap, perhaps; he sees himself

taken into partnership, his wife giving dinners, his children sent

to college. And so vivid are these possibilities to him, reading and

hearing of like histories every day in the newspapers and on the

street, that unconsciously he begins to affect the manners and habits

of the class he intends to make his own. In an astonishingly short time

they are his own; which means that he has taken the main step towards

the realization of his dream. It is the outward and visible signs of

belonging which eventually bring about that one does belong; and no

one is quicker to grasp this than the obscure American. He has the

instincts of the born climber. He never stops imitating until he dies;

and by that time his son is probably governor of the State, and his

daughter married to a title. What a people! As a Frenchman has put it,

“_il n’y a que des phenomènes!_”

One cannot conclude an introductory sketch of some of their phenomena

without a glance at their amazing architecture. The first complacent

question of the newspaper interviewer to every foreigner is: “What do

you think of our sky-scrapers?” And one is certainly compelled to do

a prodigious deal of thinking about them, whether he will or no. For

they are being torn down and hammered up higher, all over New York,

till conversation to be carried on in the street must needs become a

dialogue in monosyllabic shouts; while walking, in conjunction with

the upheavals of new Subway tunnelling, has all the excitements of

traversing an earthquake district.

[Illustration:

_Underwood & Underwood_

A PATCH OF THE CRAZY-QUILT BROADWAY, FROM 42d STREET]

This perpetual transition finds its motive in the enormous business

concentrated on the small island of Manhattan, and the constant

increase in office space demanded thereby. The commerce of the

city persistently moves north, and the residents flee before it;

leaving their fine old Knickerbocker homes to be converted into

great department stores, publishing houses, but above all into the

omnivorous office-building. The mass of these are hideous--dizzy,

squeezed-together abortions of brick and steel--but here and there

among the horrors are to be found examples of true if fantastic beauty.

The Flatiron Building is one, the Woolworth Building (especially

in its marvellous illumination by night) another, the new colonnaded

offices of the Grand Central Station a third. Yet the general

impression of New York architecture upon the average foreigner is of

illimitable confusion and ugliness.

It is because the American in art is a Futurist. He so far scorns the

ideal as to have done with imagination altogether; substituting for it

an invention so titanic in audacity that to the untrained it appears

grotesque. In place of the ideal he has set up the one thing greater:

truth. And as truth to every man is different (only standard being

relatively fixed) how can he hope for concurrence in his masterpiece?

The sky-scraper is more than a masterpiece: it is a fact. A fact of

violence, of grim struggle, and of victory; over the earth that is

too small, and the winds that rage in impotence, and the heavens that

heretofore have been useless. It is the accomplished fact of man’s

dauntless determination to wrest from the elements that which he sees

he needs; and as such it has a beauty too terrible to be described.

II

CONVENIENCE _VS._ CULTURE

Here are the two prime motives waging war in the American drama of

today. Time is money; whether for the American it is to mean anything

more is still a question. Meanwhile every time-saving convenience that

can be invented is put at his disposal, be he labouring man or governor

of a state. And, as we have seen in the case of the sky-scraper, little

or no heed is paid to the form of finish of the invention; its beauty

is its practicability for immediate and exhaustive use.

Take that most useful of all, for example: the hotel. An Englishman

goes to a hotel when he is obliged to, and then chooses the quietest he

can find. Generally it has the appearance of a private house, all but

the discreet brass plate on the door. He rings for a servant to admit

him; his meals are served in his rooms, and weeks go by without his

seeing another guest in the house. The idea is to make the hotel in as

far as possible duplicate the home.

In America it is the other way round; the New Yorker in particular

models his home after his hotel, and seizes every opportunity to

close his own house and live for weeks at a time in one of the huge

caravanseries that gobble up great areas of the city. “It is so

convenient,” he tells you, lounging in the gaudy lobby of one of these

hideous terra-cotta structures. “No servant problem, no housekeeping

worries for madame, and everything we want within reach of the

telephone bell!”

Quite true, when the pompadoured princess below-stairs condescends to

answer it. Otherwise you may sit in impotent rage, ten stories up,

while she finishes a twenty-minute conversation with her “friend”

or arranges to go to a “show” with the head barber; for in all this

palace of marble staircases and frescoed ceilings, Louis Quinze suites

and Russian baths there is not an ordinary bell in the room to call a

servant. Everything must be ordered by telephone; and what boots it

that there is a telegraph office, a stock exchange bureau, a ladies’

outfitting shop, a railroad agency, a notary, a pharmacist and an

osteopath in the building--if to control these conveniences one must

wander through miles of corridors and be shot up and down a dozen

lifts, because the telephone girl refuses to answer?

From personal experience, I should say that the servant problem is

quite as tormenting in hotels as in most other American establishments.

The condescension of these worthies, when they deign to supply you

with some simple want, is amazing. Not only in hotels, but in well-run

private houses, they seize every chance for conversation, and always

turn to the subject of their own affairs--their former prosperity, the

mere temporary necessity of their being in service, and their glowing

prospects for the future. They insist on giving you their confidential

opinion of the establishment in which you are a guest, and which is

invariably far inferior to others in which they have been employed.

They comment amiably on your garments, if they are pleased with them,

or are quite as ready to convey that they are not. And woe to him who

shows resentment! He may beseech their service henceforth in vain. If,

however, he meekly accepts them as they are, they will graciously be

pleased to perform for him the duties for which they are paid fabulous

wages.

Hotel servants constitute the aristocracy among “domestics,” as

they prefer to call themselves; just as hotel dwellers--of the more

luxurious type--constitute a kind of aristocracy among third-rate

society in New York. These people lead a strange, unreal sort of

existence, living as it were in a thickly gilded, thickly padded

vacuum, whence they issue periodically into the hands of a retinue

of hangers-on: manicures, _masseurs_, hair-dressers, and for the men

a train of speculators and sporting parasites. In this world, where

there are no definite duties or responsibilities, there are naturally

no fixed hours for anything. Meals occur when the caprice of the

individual demands them--breakfast at one, or at three, if he likes;

dinner at the supper hour, or, instead of tea, a restaurant is always

at his elbow. With the same irresponsibility, engagements are broken or

kept an hour late; agreements are forfeited or forgotten altogether;

order of any sort is unknown, and the only activity of this large class

of wealthy people is a hectic, unregulated striving after pleasure.

Women especially grow into hotel fungi of this description, sitting

about the hot, over-decorated lobbies and in the huge, crowded

restaurants, with nothing to do but stare and be stared at. They are a

curious by-product of the energetic, capable American woman in general;

and one thinks there might be salvation for them in the “housekeeping”

worries they disdainfully repudiate. Still, it cannot be denied that

with the serious problem of servants and the exorbitant prices of

household commodities a home is far more difficult to maintain in

America than in the average modern country. Hospitality under the

present conditions presents features slightly careworn; and the New

York hostess is apt to be more anxious than charming, and to end her

career on the dismal verandas of a sanatorium for nervous diseases.

But society the world round has very much the same character. For types

peculiar to a country, one must descend the ladder to rungs nearer

the native soil; in New York there are the John Browns of Harlem, for

example. No one outside America has heard of Harlem. Does the loyal

Englishman abroad speak of Hammersmith? Does the Frenchman _en voyage_

descant on the beauties of the Batignolles? These abominations are

locked within the national bosom; only Hyde Park and the Champs Elysées

and Fifth Avenue are allowed out for alien gaze. Yet quite as emphatic

of New York struggle and achievement as the few score millionaire

palaces along the avenue are the tens of thousands of cramped Harlem

flats that overspread the northern end of the island from One Hundred

and Twenty-fifth Street to the Bronx. For tens of thousands of

John Browns have daily to wage war in the deadly field of American

commercial competition, in order to pay the rent and the gas bill, and

the monthly installment on the furniture of these miniature homes. They

have not, however, to pay for the electric light, or the hot-water

heating, or a dozen other comforts which are a recurring source of

amazement to the foreigner in such a place. For twenty dollars a month,

John Brown and his wife are furnished not only with three rooms and a

luxurious porcelain bath in a white-tiled bathroom; but also the use

of two lifts, the inexhaustible services of the janitor, a comfortable

roof garden in summer, and an imposing entrance hall downstairs, done

in imitation Carrara marble and imitation Cordova leather. With this

goes a still more imposing address, and Mrs. John can rouse the eternal

envy of the weary Sixth Avenue shop-girl by ordering her lemon-squeezer

or two yards of linoleum sent to “Marie Antoinette Court,” or “The

Cornwallis Arms.” The shop-girl understands that Mrs. John’s husband is

a success.

That is, that he earns in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars a

month. With this he can afford to pay the household expenses, to dress

himself and his wife a bit better than their position demands, to

subscribe to two or three of the ten-cent magazines, and to do a play

on Broadway now and then. Mrs. John of course is a matinée fiend, and

has the candy habit. These excesses must be provided for; also John’s

five-cent cigars and his occasional mild “spree with the boys.” For the

rest, they are a prudent couple; methodically religious, inordinately

moral; banking a few dollars every month against the menacing

rainy-day, and, if this has not arrived by vacation time in August,

promptly spending the money on the lurid delights of Atlantic City or

some other ocean resort. Thence they return haggard but triumphant,

with a coat of tan laboriously acquired by wetting faces and arms, and

then sitting for hours in the broiling sun--to impress the Tom Smiths

in the flat next door that they have had a “perfectly grand time.”

A naïve, hard-working, kindly couple, severely conventional in their

prejudices, impressionable as children in their affections, and with

a certain persistent cleverness that shoots beyond the limitations of

their type, and hints to them of the habits and manners of a finer.

In them the passionate motive of self-development that dominates

all American life has so far found an outlet only in demand for the

conveniences and material comforts of the further advanced whom they

imitate. When in the natural course of things they turn their eyes

towards the culture of the Man Higher Up, they will obtain that, too.

And meanwhile does not Mrs. Brown have her Tennyson Club, and John his

uniform edition of Shakespeare?

Some New Yorkers who shudder at Harlem are not as lucky. I was once

the guest of a lady who had just moved into her sumptuous new

home on Riverside Drive. My rooms, to quote the first-class hotel

circular, were replete with every luxury; I could turn on the light

from seven different places; I could make the chairs into couches or

the couches into chairs; I could talk by one of the marvellous ebony

and silver telephones to the valet or the cook, or if I pleased to

Chicago. There was nothing mortal man could invent that had not been

put in those rooms, including six varieties of reading-lamps, and a

bed-reading-table that shot out and arranged itself obligingly when one

pushed a button.

But there was nothing to read. Apologetically, I sought my hostess.

Would she allow me to pilfer the library? For a moment the lady looked

blank. Then, with a smile of relief, she said: “Of course! You want

some magazines. How stupid of the servants. I’ll have them sent to you

at once; but you know we have no library. I think books are so ugly,

don’t you?”

I am not hopelessly addicted to veracity, but I will set my hand and

seal to this story; also to the fact that in all that palace of the

superfluous there was not to my knowledge one book of any sort. Even

the favourite whipped-cream novel of society was wanting; but magazines

of every kind and description littered the place. The reason for this

apparently inexplicable state of affairs is simple; time is money;

therefore not to be expended without calculation. In the magazine the

rushed business man, and the equally rushed business or society woman,

has a literary quick-lunch that can be swallowed in convenient bites

at odd moments during the day.

Is the business man dining out? He looks at the reviews of books he has

not read on the way to his office in the morning; criticisms of plays

he has not seen, on the way back at night. Half an hour of magazine

is made thus to yield some eight hours of theatre and twenty-four of

reading books--and his _vis-à-vis_ at dinner records at next day’s tea

party, “what a well-informed man that Mr. Worriton is! He seems to find

time for everything.”

Is the society woman “looking in” at an important reception? Between a

fitting at her dressmaker’s, luncheon, bridge and two teas, she catches

up the last Review from the pocket of her limousine, and runs over the

political notes, war news, foreign events of the week. Result: “that

Mrs. Newrich is really a remarkable woman!” declares the distinguished

guest of the reception to his hostess. “Such a breadth of interest,

such an intelligent outlook! It is genuine pleasure to meet a woman who

shows some acquaintance with the affairs of the day.”

And so again they hoodwink one another, each practicing the same

deceptive game of superficial show; yet none suspecting any of the

rest. And the magazine syndicates flourish and multiply. In this piece

that is in preparation, the actors are too busy proving themselves

capable of their parts really to take time to become so. To succeed

with them, you must offer your dose in tabloids: highly concentrated

essence of whatever it is, and always sugar-coated. Then they will

swallow it promptly, and demand more. Remember, too, that what they

want in the way of “culture” is not drama, or literature, or music;

but excitement--of admiration, pity, the erotic or the sternly moral

sense. Their nerves must be kept at a certain perpetual tension. He who

overlooks this supreme fact, in creating for them, fails.

There are in America today some thousands of men and women who have

taken the one step further than their fellows in that they realize

this, and so are able shrewdly to pander to the national appetites. The

result is a continuous outpouring of novels and short stories, plays

and hybrid songs, such as in a less vast and less extravagant country

would ruin one another by their very multitude; but which in the United

States meet with an appalling success. Appalling, because it is not a

primitive, but a too exotic, fancy that delights in them. For his mind

as for his body, the American demands an overheated dwelling; when

not plunged within the hectic details of a “best-seller,” by way of

recreation, he is apt to be immersed in the florid joys of a Broadway

extravaganza.

These unique American productions, made up of large beauty choruses,

magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, elaborate fantasies of ballet

and song, bear the same relation to actual drama that the best-sellers

bear to literature, and are as popular. The Hippodrome, with its huge

stage accommodating four hundred people, and its enormous central tank

for water spectacles, is easily first among the extravaganza houses

of New York. Twice a day an eager audience, drawn from all classes

of metropolitan and transient society, crowds the great amphitheatre

to the doors. The performance prepared for them is on the order of

a French révue: a combination circus and vaudeville, held together

by a thin thread of plot that permits the white-flannelled youth

and bejewelled maiden, who have faithfully exclaimed over each new

sensation of the piece, finally to embrace one another, with the novel

cry of “at last!”

Meanwhile kangaroos engage in a boxing match, hippopotami splash most

of the reservoir over the “South Sea Girls”; the Monte Carlo Casino

presents its hoary tables as background for the “Dance of the Jeunesse

Dorée,” and Maoris from New Zealand give an imitation of an army of

tarantulas writhing from one side of the stage to another. The climax

is a stupendous _tableau en pyramide_ of fountains, marble staircases,

gilded thrones, and opalescent canopies; built up, banked, and held

together by girls of every costume and complexion. Nothing succeeds

in New York without girls; the more there are, the more triumphant

the success. So the Hippodrome, being in every way triumphant, has

mountains of them: tall girls and little girls, Spanish girls, Japanese

girls, Hindoo girls and French girls; and at the very top of the peak,

where the “spot” points its dazzling ray, the American girl, wrapped

in the Stars and Stripes of her apotheosis. _Ecco!_ The last word has

been said; applause thunders to the rafters; the flag is unfurled, to

show the maiden in the victorious garb of a Captain of the Volunteers;

and the curtain falls amid the lusty strains of the national anthem.

Everybody goes home happy, and the box office nets five thousand

dollars. They know the value of patriotism, these good Hebrews.

This sentiment, always near the surface with Americans, grows deeper

and more fervid as it localizes; leading to a curiously intense

snobbism on the part of one section of the country towards another.

Thus New York society sniffs at Westerners; let them approach the

citadel ever so heavily armed with gold mines, they have a long siege

before it surrenders to them. On the other hand, the same society

smiles eagerly upon Southerners of no pocket-books at all; and feeds

and fêtes and fawns upon them, because they are doomed, the minute

their Southern accent is heard, to come of “a good old family.” The

idea of a decayed aristocracy in two-hundred-year-old America is not

without comedy, but in the States Southerners are taken very solemnly,

by themselves as by everyone else.

My friend of the æsthetic antipathy to books (really a delightful

person) is a Southerner--or was, before gathered into the fold of the

New York Four Hundred. She apologized for taking me to the Horse Show

(which she thought might amuse me, however), because “no one goes any

more. It’s all Middle West and commuters.” For the benefit of those

imperfect in social geography I must explain that Middle West is the

one thing worse than West, and that commuters are those unfortunates

without the sacred pale, who are forced to journey to and from

Manhattan by ferries or underground tubes. They are the butt of comic

newspaper supplements, topical songs, and society witticisms; also the

despised and over-charged “out-of-town customers” of the haughty Fifth

Avenue importer.

For the latter (a phenomenon unique to New York) has her own system of

snobbism, quite as elaborate as that of her proudest client. They are

really a remarkable mixture of superciliousness and abject servility,

these Irish and Hebrew “Madame Celestes,” whose thriving establishments

form so conspicuous a part of the important avenue. As exponents of the

vagaries of American democracy, they deserve a paragraph to themselves.

Each has her rococo shop, and her retinue of mannequin assistants

garbed in the extreme of fashion; each makes her yearly or bi-yearly

trip to Paris, from which she returns with strange and bizarre

creations, which she assures her patrons are the “only thing” being

worn by _Parisiennes_ this season. Now even the untutored male knows

that there is never an “only thing” favoured by the capricious and

original _Parisienne_; but that she changes with every wind, and in all

seasons wears everything under the sun (including ankle-bracelets and

Cubist hats), provided it has the one hall-mark: _chic_.

But Madame New York meekly accepts the Irish lady’s dictum, and arrays

herself accordingly--with what result of extravagant monotony we shall

see later on. Enough for the present that she is absolutely submissive

to the vulgar taste and iron decrees of the rubicund “Celeste” from

Cork, and that the latter alternately condescends and grovels to her,

in a manner amazing to the foreigner, who may be looking on. Yet

on second thoughts it is quite explicable: after the habit of all

Americans, native or naturalized, “Celeste” cannot conceal that she

considers herself “as good as” anyone, if not a shade better than

some. At the same time, again truly American, she worships the dollars

madame represents (and whose aggregate she can quote to a decimal), and

respects the lady in proportion. Hence her bewildering combinations of

“certainly, Madame--it shall be exactly as Madame orders,” with “Oh,

_my dear_, I wouldn’t have that! Why, girlie, that on you with your

dark skin would look like sky-blue on an Indian! But, see, dear, here’s

a pretty pink model”--etc., etc.

And so it continues, unctuous deference sandwiched between endearments

and snubs throughout the entire conference of shopkeeper and customer;

and the latter takes it all as a matter of course, though, if her own

husband should venture to disagree with her on any point of judgment,

she would be furious with him for a week. When I commented to one

lady on these familiar blandishments and criticisms of shop people in

New York, she said indulgently: “Oh, they all do it. They don’t mean

anything; it’s only their way.”

Yet I have heard that same lady hotly protest against the wife of

a Colorado silver magnate (whom she had known for years) daring to

address her by her Christian name. “That vulgar Westerner!” she

exclaimed; “the next thing she’ll be calling me dear!”

Democracy remains democracy as long as it cannot possibly encroach upon

the social sphere; the moment the boundary is passed, however, and the

successful “climber” threatens equal footing with the _grande dame_ on

the other side, herself still climbing in England or Europe, anathema!

The fact is, that Americans, like all other very young people, seek to

hide their lack of assurance--social and otherwise--by an aggressive

policy of defense which they call independence; but which is verily

snobbism of the most virulent brand. From the John Browns to the

multimillionaires with daughters who are duchesses, they are intent on

emphasizing their own position and its privileges; unconscious that if

they themselves were sure of it so would be everyone else.

But inevitably the actors must stumble and stammer, and insert false

lines, before finally they shall “feel” their parts, and forge ahead to

the victory of finished performance.

III

OFF DUTY

When one ponders what the New Yorker in his leisure hours most enjoys,

one answers without hesitation: feeding. The word is not elegant,

but neither is the act, as one sees it in process at the mammoth

restaurants. Far heavier and more prolonged than mere eating and

drinking is this serious cult of food on the part of the average

Manhattanite. It has even led to the forming of a distinct “set,”

christened by some satirical outsider: “Lobster Society.”

Here are met the moneyed plutocrat and his exuberant “lady friend,”

the mauve-waistcoated sporting man, the society _déclassée_ with her

gorgeous jewels and little air of tragedy, the expansive Hebrew and his

chorus girl, the gauche out-of-town couple with their beaming smiles

and last season’s clothes: all that hazy limbo that hovers on the

social boundary-line, but hovers futilely--and that seeks to smother

its disappointment with elaborate feasts of over-rich food.

[Illustration:

_Underwood & Underwood_

“NEW YORK’S FINEST”: THE FAMOUS MOUNTED POLICE SQUAD]

It is amazing the thousands of these people that there are--New York

seems to breed them faster than any other type; and the hundreds of

restaurants they support. Every hotel has its three or four huge

dining-rooms, its Palm Garden, Dutch Grill, etc.; but, as all these

were not enough, shrewd Frenchmen and Germans and Viennese have dotted

the city with _cafés_ and _brauhausen_ and _Little Hungaries_, to say

nothing of the alarming Egyptian and Turkish abortions that are the

favourite erection of the American restaurateur himself.

The typical New York feeding-place from the outside is a palace in

terra cotta; from the inside, a vast galleried room or set of rooms,

upheld by rose or ochre marble pillars, carpeted with thick red rugs,

furnished with bright gilt chairs and heavily damasked, flower-laden

tables--the whole interspersed and overtopped and surrounded by a

jumble of fountains, gilt-and-onyx Sphinxes, caryatids, centaurs,

bacchantes, and heaven knows what else of the superfluous and

disassociated. To reach one’s table, one must thread one’s way through

a maze of lions couchant, peacocks with spread mother o’ pearl tails,

and opalescent dragons that turn out to be lights: proud detail of the

“million dollar decorative scheme” referred to in the advertisements

of the house. Finally anchored in this sea of sumptuousness, one is

confronted with the dire necessity of ordering a meal from a menu that

would have staggered Epicurus.

There is the table d’hôte of nine courses--any one of them a meal

in itself; or there is the bewildering _carte du jour_, from which

to choose strawberries in December, oranges in May, or whatever

collection of ruinous exotics one pleases. The New Yorker himself goes

methodically down the list, from oysters to iced pudding; impartial

in his recognition of the merits of lobster bisque, _sole au gratin_,

creamed sweetbreads, porterhouse steak, broiled partridge and Russian

salad. He sits down to this orgy about seven o’clock, and rises--or

is assisted to rise--about ten or half past, unless he is going on to

a play, in which case he disposes of his nine courses with the same

lightning execution displayed at his quick-lunch, only increasing his

drink supply to facilitate the process.

Meanwhile there is the “Neapolitan Quartet,” and the Hungarian

Rhapsodist, and the lady in the pink satin blouse who sings “The

Rosary,” to amuse our up-to-date Nero. I wonder what the Romans

would make of the modern cabaret? Like so many French importations,

stripped in transit of their saving coat of French _esprit_, the

cabaret in American becomes helplessly vulgar. Extreme youth cannot

carry off the risqué, which requires the salt of worldly wisdom; it

only succeeds in being rowdy. And the noisy songs, the loud jokes, the

blatant dances--all the spurious clap-trap which in these New York

feeding-resorts passes for amusement--point to the most youthful sort

of rowdyism: to a popular discrimination still in embryo. But the

New Yorker dotes on it--the cabaret, I mean; if for no other reason,

because it satisfies his passion for getting his money’s worth. He is

ready to pay a handsome price, but he demands handsome return, and no

“extras” if you please.

When the ten-cent charge for bread and butter was inaugurated by

New York restaurateurs last Spring, their patrons were furious; it

hinted of the parsimonious European charge for “cover.” But if the

short-sighted proprietors had quietly added five cents to the price of

each article on the menu, it would have passed unnoticed: it is not

paying that the American minds, it is “being done.” Conceal from him

this humiliating consciousness, and he will empty his pockets. Thus, at

the theatre, seats are considerably higher than in European cities, but

they are also far more comfortable; and include a program, sufficient

room for one’s hat and wrap, the free services of the usher, and as

many glasses of the beloved ice-water as one cares to call for. People

would not tolerate being disturbed throughout the performance by the

incessant demands for a “_petite service_” and other supplements that

persecute the Continental theatre-goer; while as for being forced to

leave one’s wraps in a _garde-robe_, and to pay for the privilege of

fighting to recover them, the independent American would snort at the

bare idea. He insists on a maximum amount of comfort for his money, and

on paying for it in a lump sum, either at the beginning or at the end.

Convenience, the almighty god, acknowledges no limits to its sway.

It was convenience that until recently made it the custom for the

average New York play-goer to appear at the theatre in morning dress.

The tired business man could afford to go to the play, but had not the

energy to change for it; so, naturally, his wife and daughter did not

change either, and the orchestra presented a commonplace aspect, made

up of shirtwaists and high-buttoned coats. Now, however, following

the example of society, people are beginning to break away from this

unattractive austerity; and theatre audiences are enlivened by a

sprinkling of light frocks and white shirts.

We have already commented on the most popular type of dramatic

amusement in America: the extravaganza, and musical comedy so-called;

it is time now to mention the gradually developing legitimate drama,

which has its able exponents in Augustus Thomas, Edward Sheldon,

Eugene Walter, the late Clyde Fitch, and half a dozen others of no

less insight and ability. Their plays present the stirring and highly

dramatic scenes of American business and social life (using social in

its original sense); and while for the foreigner many of the situations

lose their full significance--being peculiar to America, in rather

greater degree than French plays are peculiar to France, and English to

England--even he must be impressed with the vivid realism and powerful

climax of the best American comedies.

The nation as a whole is vehemently opposed to tragedy in any form,

and demands of books and plays alike that they invariably shall end

well. Such brilliant exceptions as Eugene Walter’s “The Easiest Way”

and Sheldon’s “The Nigger,” only prove the rule that the successful

piece must have a “happy ending.” High finance plays naturally an

important part as nucleus of plots; also the marriage of working girls

with scions of the Upper Ten. But the playwright has only to look into

the newspapers, in this country of perpetual adventure, to find enough

romance and sensation to fill every theatre in New York.

It seems almost as though the people themselves are surfeited with the

actual drama that surrounds them, for they are rather languid as an

audience, and must be piqued by more and more startling “thrillers”

before moved to enthusiasm. Even then their applause is usually

directed towards the “star,” in whom they take far keener interest

than in the play itself. It is interesting to follow this passionate

individualism of the nation that dominates its amusements as well as

its activities. The player, not the play’s the thing with Americans;

and on theatrical bills the name of the principal actor or actress is

always given the largest type, the title of the piece next largest;

while the author is tucked away like an afterthought in letters that

can just be seen.

The acute American business man, who is always a business man, whether

financing a railroad or a Broadway farce, is not slow to profit by

the _penchant_ of the public for “big” names. By means of unlimited

advertising and the right kind of notoriety, he builds up ordinary

actors into valuable theatrical properties. Given a comedian of average

talent, average good looks, and an average amount of magnetism, _and_

a clever press agent: he has a star! This brilliant being draws five

times the salary of the leading lady of former years (a woman star is

obviously a shade or two more radiant than a man), and in return has

only to confide her life history and beauty recipés to her adoring

public, via the current magazines. Furthermore stars are received

with open arms by Society (which leading ladies were not), and may be

divorced oftener than other people without injury--rather with distinct

advantage--to their reputation. Each new divorce gives a fillip to the

public curiosity, and so brings in money to the box office.

Not only in the field of the “legitimate” is a big name the

all-important asset of an artist. Ladies who have figured in murder

trials, gentlemen whom circumstantial evidence alone has failed to

prove assassins, are eagerly sought after by enterprising vaudeville

managers, who beg them to accept the paltry sum of a thousand dollars

a week, for showing themselves to curious crowds, and delivering a

ten-minute monologue on the deficiencies of American law! How or why

the name has become “big” is a matter of only financial moment; and

Americans of rigid respectability flock to stare at ex-criminals,

members of the under-world temporarily in the limelight, and young

persons whose sole claim to distinction lies in the glamour shed by

one-time royal favour. Thanks to press agents and newspapers, the

affairs of this motley collection--as indeed of “stars” of every

lustre--are so constantly and so intimately before the public, that one

hears people of all classes discussing them as though they were their

lifelong friends.

Thus at the theatre: “Oh, no, the play isn’t anything, but I come to

see Laura Lee. Isn’t she stunning? You ought to see her in blue--she

says herself blue’s her colour. I don’t think much of these dresses

she’s wearing tonight; she got them at Héloïse’s. Now generally she

gets her things at Robert’s--she says Robert just suits her _genre_.”

Again, at the restaurant: “How seedy May Morris is looking--there she

is, over by the window. You know she divorced her first husband because

he made her pay the rent, and now she’s leading a cat-and-dog life with

this one because he’s jealous of the manager. That’s Mrs. Willy Spry

who just spoke to her; well, I didn’t know she knew _her_!”

What they do not know about celebrities of all sorts would be hard to

teach Americans, particularly the women. They can tell you how many

eggs Caruso eats for breakfast, and describe to the last rosebush

Maude Adams’ country home; their interest in the drama and music

these people interpret trails along tepidly, in wake of their worship

for the successful individual. Americans are not a musical people.

They go to opera because it is fashionable to be seen there, and to

concerts and recitals for the most part because they confer the proper

æsthetic touch. But only a handful have any real knowledge or love of

music, and that handful is continually crucified by the indifference

of the rest. I can think of no more painful experience for a sincere

music-lover than to attend a performance at the Metropolitan Opera;

and this not only because people are continually coming in and going

out, destroying the continuity of the piece, but because the latter

itself is carelessly executed and often faulty. Here again the quartet

of exorbitantly paid stars are charged with the success of the entire

performance; the conductor is an insignificant quantity, and the chorus

goes its lackadaisical way unheeded--even smiling and exchanging

remarks in the background, with no one the wiser. From a box near the

stage I once saw two priests in “_Aïda_” jocosely tweak one another’s

beards just at the moment of the majestic _finale_. Why not? The

audience, if it pays attention to the opera at all, pays it to Caruso

and Destinn and Homer--to the big name and the big voice; not to petty

detail such as chorus and _mise-en-scène_.

But of course opera is the last thing for which people buy ten-dollar

seats at the Metropolitan. The “Golden Horse-Shoe” is the spectacle

they pay to see; the masterpieces of _Céleste_ and _Héloïse_ (as

exhibited by Madame Millions and her intimates) rather than the

masterpieces of Wagner or Puccini lure them within the great

amphitheatre. And certain it is that the famous double tier of boxes

boasts more beautiful women, gorgeously arrayed, than any other place

of assembly in America. Yet as I first saw them, from my modest seat

in the orchestra, they appeared to be a collection of radiant Venuses

sitting in gilded bathtubs: above the high box-rail, only rows of

gleaming shoulders, marvellously dressed heads, and winking jewels were

visible. Later, in the foyer, I discovered that some of them at least

were more modernly attired than the lady who rose from the sea, but the

first impression has always remained the more vivid.

Society--ever deliciously naïve in airing its ignorance--is heard to

express some quaint criticisms at opera. At a performance of _Tristan_,

I sat next a débutante who had the reputation of being “musical.” In

the midst of the glorious second act, she whispered plaintively, “I do

hate it when our night falls on _Tristan_--it’s such a _sad_ story!”

It will be interesting to follow New York musical education, if the

indefatigable Mr. Hammerstein succeeds in his present proposal to offer

the lighter French and Italian operas at popular prices. Hitherto music

along with every other art in America has been so commercialized that

wealth rather than appreciation and true fondness has controlled it.

But meanwhile there has developed, instinctively and irrepressibly,

the much disparaged ragtime. It is the pose among musical _précieux_

loudly to decry any suggestion of ragtime as a national art; yet the

fact remains that it has grown up spontaneously as the popular and the

only distinctly American form of musical expression. Of course, the

old shuffling clog-dances of the negroes were responsible for it in

the beginning. I was visiting some Americans in Tokio when a portfolio

of the “new music” was sent out to them (1899), and I remember that it

consisted entirely of cakewalks and “coon songs,” with negro titles

and pictures of negroes dancing, on the cover. But this has long since

ceased to be characteristic of ragtime as a whole, which takes its

inspiration from every phase of nervous, precipitate American life.

In the jerky, syncopated measures, one can almost hear between

beats the familiar rush of feet, hurrying along--stumbling--halting

abruptly--only to fly ahead faster. Ragtime is the pell-mell,

helter-skelter, headlong spirit of America expressed in tune; and no

other people, however charmed by its peculiar fascination and wild

swing, can play or dance to it like Americans. It is instinctive with

them; where classical music, so called, is a laboriously acquired taste.

New Yorkers in particular take their artistic hobbies very seriously;

not only music and the conventional arts, but all those occult and

mystic off-shoots that abound wherever there are idle people. To

assuage the ennui that dogs excessive wealth, they devote themselves

to all sorts of cults and intricate beliefs. Swamis, crystal-gazers,

astrologers, mind-readers, and Messiahs of every kind and colour reap

a luxurious harvest in New York. Women especially have a new creed for

every month in the year; and discuss “the aura,” and “the submerged

self,” and the “spiritual significance of colour,” with profound

solemnity. On being presented to a lady, you are apt to be asked

your birth date, the number of letters in your Christian name, your

favourite hue, and other momentous questions that must be cleared away

before acquaintance can proceed, or even begin at all.

“John?” cries the lady. “I knew you were a John, the minute I saw you!

Now, what do you think I am?”

You are sure to say a “Mabel” where she is an “Edith,” or a Gladys

where she is a Helen, or to commit some other blunder which takes the

better part of an hour to be explained to you. Week-end parties are

perfect hot-beds of occultism, each guest striving to out-argue every

other in the race to gain proselytes for his religion of the moment.

The American house-party on the whole is a much more serious affair

than its original English model. The anxious American hostess never

quite gains that casual, easy manner of putting her house at the

disposal of her guests, and then forgetting it and them. She must be

always “entertaining,” than which there is no more dreary persecution

for the long-suffering visitor. Except for this, her hospitality is

delightful; and it is a joy to leave the dust and roar of New York, and

motor out to one of the many charming country houses on Long Island or

up the Hudson for a peaceful week-end. Americans show great good sense

in clinging to their native Colonial architecture, which lends itself

admirably to the simple, well-kept lawns and old-fashioned gardens.

In comparison with country estates of the old world, one misses the

dignity of ancient stone and trees; but gains the airy openness and

many luxuries of modern comfort.

As for country life in general, it is further advanced than on the

Continent, but not so far advanced as in England. Americans, being a

young people, are naturally an informal people, however they may rig

themselves out when they are on show. They love informal clothes, and

customs, and the happy-go-lucky freedom of out-of-doors. On the other

hand, they are not a sporting people, except by individuals. They are

athletes rather than sportsmen; the passion for individual prowess

being very strong, the devotion to sport for sport’s sake much less in

evidence. The spirit of competition is as keen in the athletic field

as it is in Wall Street; and at the intercollegiate games enthusiasm

is always centred on the particular hero of each side, rather than on

the play of the team as a whole. The American in general distinguishes

himself in the “individual” rather than the team sports--in running,

swimming, skating, and tennis; all of which display to fine advantage

his wiry, lean agility.

At the same time, there is nothing more typically American or more

inspiring to watch than one of the great collegiate team games, when

thirty thousand spectators are massed round the field, breathlessly

intent on every detail. Even in an immense city like New York, on the

day of a big game, one feels a peculiar excitement in the air. The

hotels are full of eager boys with sweaters, through the streets dash

gaily decorated motors, and the stations are crowded with fathers,

mothers, sisters and sweethearts on their way to cheer their particular

hopeful. For once, too, the harassed man of affairs throws business to

the four winds, remembers only that he is an “old grad” of Harvard or

Princeton or Yale, and hurries off to cheer for his Alma Mater.

Then at the field there are the two vast semicircles of challenging

colours, the advance “rooting”--the songs, yells, ringing of bells and

tooting of horns--that grows to positive frenzy as the two contesting

teams come in and take their places. And, as the game proceeds,

the still more fervent shouts--middle-aged men standing up on their

seats and bawling three-times-threes, young girls laughing, crying,

splitting their gloves in madness of applause, small boys screeching

encouragement to “our side,” withering taunts to the opponents; and

then all at once a deathly hush--in such a huge congregation twice as

impressive as all their noise--while a goal is made or a home base run.

And the enthusiasm breaks forth more furious than ever.

We are a long way now from the stodgy, dull-eyed diner-out, in his

murky lair; now, we are looking on at youth at its best--its most eager

and unconscious; in which guise Americans in their vivid charm are

irresistible.

IV

MISS NEW YORK, JR.

There is no woman in modern times of whom so much has been written,

so little said, as of the American woman. Essayists have echoed one

another in pronouncing her the handsomest, the best dressed, the most

virtuous, and altogether the most attractive woman the world round.

Psychologists have let her carefully alone; she is not a simple problem

to expound. She is, however, a most interesting one, and I have not the

courage to slight her with the usual cursory remarks on eyes, hair, and

figure. She deserves a second and more searching glance.

To her own countrymen she is a goddess on a pedestal that never

totters; to the foreigner she is a pretty, restless, thoroughly selfish

female, who roams the earth at scandalous liberty, while her husband

sits at home and posts checks. Naturally, the truth--if one can get

at truth regarding such a complex creature--falls between these two

conceptions: the American woman is a splendid, faulty human being, in

whom the extremes of human weakness and nobility seem surely to have

met. She is the product of the extreme Western philosophy of absolute

individualism, and as such is constituted a law unto herself, which

she defies the world to gainsay. At the same time she knows herself

so little that she changes and contradicts this law constantly, thus

bewildering those who are trying to understand it and her.

For example, we are convinced of her independence. We go with her to

the milliner’s. She wants a hat with plumes. “Oh, but, _my dear_,”

says the saleslady reprovingly, “they aren’t wearing plumes this

season--they aren’t wearing them _at all_. Everybody is having Paradise

feathers.” Madame New York instantly declares that in that case she

must have Paradise feathers, too, and is thoroughly content when the

same are added to the nine hundred and ninety-nine other feathers that

flutter out the avenue next afternoon. Plumes may be far more becoming

to her; in her heart she may secretly regret them; but she must have

what everyone else has. _She has not the independence to break away

from the herd._

And so it is with all her costume, her coiffure, the very bag on her

wrist and brooch at her throat: every detail must be that detail of

the _type_. She neither dares nor knows how to be different. But,

within the stronghold of the type, she dares anything. Are “they”

wearing narrow skirts? Every New York woman challenges every other,

with her frock three inches tighter than the last lady’s. Are they

slashing skirts to the ankle in Paris? Madame New York slashes hers to

the shoe-tops, always provided she has the concurrence of “those” of

Manhattan. Once secured by the sanction of the mass, her instinct for

exaggeration is unleashed; her perverse imagination shakes off its

chronic torpor, and soars to flights of fearful and wonderful audacity.

Even then, however, she originates no fantasy of her own, but simply

elaborates and enlarges upon the primary copy. Her impulse is not to

think and create, but to observe and assimilate. It would never occur

to her to study the lines of her head and arrange her hair accordingly;

rather she studies the head of her next-door neighbour, and promptly

duplicates it--generally with distinct improvement over the original.

True to her race, she has a genius for imitation that will not be

subdued. But she is not an artist.

For this reason, the American woman bores us with her vanity, where

the Englishwoman rouses our tenderness, and the Frenchwoman piques and

allures. There is an appealing clumsiness in the way the Englishwoman

goes about adding her little touches of feminine adornment; the badly

tied bow, the awkward bit of lace, making their deprecating bid for

favour. The Frenchwoman, with her seductive devices of alternate

concealment and daring displays, lays constant emphasis on the two

outstanding charms of all femininity: mystery and change. But when we

come to the American woman we are confronted with that most depressing

of personalities, the stereotyped. She has made of herself a mannequin

for the exposition of expensive clothes, costly jewels, and a mass of

futile accessories that neither in themselves nor as pointers to an

individuality signify anything whatsoever. This figure of set elegance

she has overlaid with a determined animation that is never allowed to

flag, but keeps the puppet in an incessant state of laughing, smiling,

chattering--motion of one sort or another--till we long for the

machinery to run down, and the show to be ended.

But this never occurs, except when the entire elaborate mechanism falls

to pieces with a crash; and the woman becomes that wretched, sexless

thing--a nervous wreck. Till then, to use her own favourite expression,

“she will go till she drops,” and the onlooker is forced to watch her

in the unattractive process.

Of course the motive of this excessive activity on the part of American

men and women alike is the passionate wish to appear young. As in

the extreme East age is worshipped, here in the extreme West youth

constitutes a religion, of which young women are the high priestesses.

Far from moving steadily on to a climax in ripe maturity, life for the

American girl reaches its dazzling apex when she is eighteen or twenty;

this, she is constantly told by parents, teachers and friends, is the

golden period of her existence. She is urged to make the most of every

precious minute; and everything and everybody must be sacrificed in

helping her to do it.

As a matter of course, she is given the most comfortable room in the

house, the prettiest clothes, the best seat at the theatre. As a matter

of course, she accepts them. Why should it occur to her to defer to

age, when age anxiously and at every turn defers to her? Oneself as

the pivot of existence is far more interesting than any other creature;

and it is all so brief. Soon will come marriage, with its tiresome

responsibilities, its liberty curtailed, and children, the forerunners

of awful middle age. Laugh, dance, and amuse yourself today is the

eternal warning in the ears of the American girl; for tomorrow you

will be on the shelf, and another generation will have come into your

kingdom.

The young lady is not slow to hear the call--or to follow it. With

feverish haste, she seizes her prerogative of queen of the moment, and

demands the satisfaction of her every caprice. Her tastes and desires

regulate the diversion and education of the community. What she favours

succeeds; what she frowns on fails. A famous American actress told me

that she traced her fortune to her popularity with young girls. “I

never snub them,” she said; “when they write me silly letters, I answer

them. I guard my reputation to the point of prudishness, so that I may

meet them socially, and invite them to my home. They are the talisman

of my career. It matters little what I play--if the young girls like

me, I have a success.”

The wise theatrical manager, however, is differently minded. He, too,

has his harvests to reap from the approval of Miss New York, Jr.,

and arranges his program accordingly. Thus the American play-goer is

treated to a series of musical comedies, full of smart slang scrappily

composed round a hybrid waltz; so-called “society plays,” stocked with

sumptuous clothes, many servants, and shallow dialogue; unrecognizable

“adapted” pieces, expurgated not only of the _risqué_, but of all

wit and local atmosphere as well; and finally the magnificently

vacuous extravaganza: this syrup and mush is regularly served to the

theatre-going public, and labelled “drama”! Yet thousands of grown

men and women meekly swallow it--even come to prefer it--because

_Mademoiselle Miss_ so decrees.

She also is originally responsible for the multitude of “society

novels,” vapid short stories, and profusely illustrated gift books,

which make up the literature of modern America. On her altar is the

vulgar “Girl Calendar,” the still more vulgar poster; flaunting

her self-conscious prettiness from every shop window, every subway

and elevated book-stall. She is displayed to us with dogs, with

cats, in the country, in town, getting into motors, getting out of

boats, driving a four-in-hand, or again a vacuum cleaner--for she

is indispensable to the advertising agent. Her fixed good looks and

studied poses have invaded the Continent; and even in Spain, in

the sleepy old town of Toledo, among the grave prints of Velasquez

and Ribera, I came across the familiar pert silhouette with its

worshipping-male counterpart, and read the familiar title: “At the

Opera.”

From all this superficial self-importance, whether of her own or her

elders’ making, one might easily write the American girl down as a

vain, empty-headed nonentity, not worth thoughtful consideration. On

the contrary, she decidedly is worth it. Behind her arrogance and

foolish affectations is a mind alert to stimulus, a heart generous and

warm to respond, a spirit brave and resourceful. It takes adversity to

prove the true quality of this girl, for then her arrogance becomes

high determination; her absurdities fall from her, like the cheap cloak

they are, and she takes her natural place in the world as a courageous,

clear-sighted woman.

I believe that among the working girls is to be found the finest and

most distinct type of American woman. This sounds a sweeping statement,

and one difficult to substantiate; but let us examine it. Whence

are the working girls of New York recruited? From the families of

immigrants, you guess at once. Only a very small fraction. The great

majority come from American homes, in the North, South, or Middle West,

where the fathers have failed in business, or died, or in some other

way left the daughters to provide for themselves.

The first impulse, on the part of the latter, is to go to New York. If

you are going to hang yourself, choose a big tree, says the Talmud;

and Americans have written it into their copy-books forever. Whether

they are to succeed or fail, they wish to do it in the biggest place,

on the biggest scale they can achieve. The girl who has to earn her

living, therefore, establishes herself in New York. And then begins

the struggle that is the same for women the world over, but which the

American girl meets with a sturdiness and obstinate ambition all her

own.

She may have been the pampered darling of a mansion with ten servants;

stoutly now she takes up her abode in a “third floor back,” and becomes

her own laundress. For it is part of all the contradictions of which

she is the unit that, while the most recklessly extravagant, she is

also, when occasion demands, the most practical and saving of women.

Her scant six or seven dollars a week are carefully portioned out to

yield the utmost value on every penny. She walks to and from her work,

thus saving ten cents and doing benefit to her complexion at the same

time in the tingling New York air. In the shop or office she is quiet,

competent, marvellously quick to seize and assimilate the details of a

business which two months ago she had never heard of. Without apparent

effort, she soon makes herself invaluable, and then comes the thrilling

event of her first “raise.”

I am talking always of the American girl of good parentage and

refinement, _who is the average New York business girl_; not of the

gum-chewing, haughty misses of stupendous pompadour and impertinence,

who condescend to wait on one in the cheaper shops. The average girl is

sinned against rather than sinning, in the matter of impudence. Often

of remarkable prettiness, and always of neat and attractive appearance,

she has not only the usual masculine advances to contend with, but

also the liberties of that inter-sex freedom peculiar to America. The

Englishman or the European never outgrows his first rude sense of shock

at the promiscuous contact between men and women, not only allowed, but

taken as a matter of course in the new country. To see an employé,

passing through a shop, touch a girl’s hand or pat her on the shoulder,

while delivering some message or order, scandalizes the foreigner only

less than the girl’s nonchalant acceptance of the familiarity.

But among these people there is none of the sex consciousness that

pervades older civilizations. Boys and girls, instead of being strictly

segregated from childhood, are brought up together in frank intimacy.

Whether the result is more or less desirable, in the young man and

young woman, the fact remains that the latter are quite without that

sex sensitiveness which would make their mutual attitude impossible in

any other country. If the girl in the shop resents the touch of the

young employé, it is not because it is a man’s touch, but because it is

(as she considers) the touch of an inferior. I know this to be true,

from having watched young people in all classes of American society,

and having observed the unvarying indifference with which these

caresses are bestowed and received. Indeed it is slanderous to call

them caresses; rather are they the playful motions of a lot of young

puppies or kittens.

The American girl therefore is committing no breach of dignity when

she allows herself to be touched by men who are her equals. But I have

noticed time and again that the moment those trifling attentions take

on the merest hint of the serious, she is on guard--and formidable.

Having been trained all her life to take care of herself (and in this

she is truly and admirably independent), without fuss or unnecessary

words she proceeds to put her knowledge to practical demonstration.

The following conversation, heard in an upper Avenue shop, is typical:

“Morning, Miss Dale. Say, but you’re looking some swell today--that

waist’s a peach! (The young floor-walker lays an insinuating hand on

Miss Dale’s sleeve.) How’d you like to take in a show tonight?”

“Thank you, I’m busy tonight.”

“Well, then, tomorrow?”

“I’m busy tomorrow night, too.”

“Oh, all right, make it Friday--any night you say.”

Miss Dale leaves the gloves she has been sorting, to face the

floor-walker squarely across the counter. “Look here, Mr. Barnes; since

you can’t take a hint, I’ll give it you straight from the shoulder:

you’re not my kind, and I’m not yours. And the sooner that’s understood

between us, the better for both. Good morning.”

Here is none of the hesitating reserve of the English or French woman

under the same circumstances, but a frank, downright declaration of

fact; infinitely more convincing than the usual stumbling feminine

excuses. It may be added that, while the American girl in a shop is

generally a fine type of creature, the American man in a shop is

generally inferior. Otherwise he would “get out and hustle for a bigger

job.” His feminine colleagues realize this, and are apt to despise him

in consequence. Certainly there is little of any over-intimacy between

shop men and girls; and the demoralizing English system of “living-in”

does not exist.

But there is a deeper reason for the general morality of the American

working girl: her high opinion of herself. This passion (for it is

really that), which in the girl of idle wealth shows itself in cold

selfishness and meaningless adornment, in her self-dependent sister

reaches the point of an ideal. When the American girl goes into

business, it is not as a makeshift until she shall marry, or until

something else turns up; it is because she has confidence in herself

to make her own life, and to make it a success. The faint heart and

self-mistrust which work the undoing of girls of this class in other

nations have no place in the character of Miss America. Resolutely

she fixes her goal, and nothing can stop her till she has attained

it. Failure, disappointment, rebuff only seem to steel her purpose

stronger; and, if the worst comes to worst, nine times out of ten she

will die rather than acknowledge herself beaten by surrendering to a

man.

But she dies hard, and has generally compassed her purpose long since.

It may be confined to rising from “notions” to “imported models” in

a single shop; or it may be running the gamut from office girl to

head manager of an important business. No matter how ambitious her

aspiration, or the seeming impossibility of it, the American girl is

very apt to get what she wants in the end. She has the three great

assets for success: pluck, self-confidence, and keen wits; and they

carry her often far beyond her most daring dreams of attainment.

My friend, Cynthia Brand, is an example. She came to New York when she

was twenty-two, with thirty dollars and an Idea. The idea was to design

clothes for young girls between the ages of twelve and twenty; clothes

that should be at once simple and distinguished, and many miles removed

from the rigid commonplaceness of the “Misses’ Department.” All very

well, but where was the shop, the capital, the _clientèle_? In the tip

of Cynthia’s pencil.

She had two or three dozen sketches and one good tailored frock.

Every American woman who is successful begins with a good tailored

frock. Cynthia put hers on, took her sketches under her arm, and went

to the best dressmaking establishment in New York. That is another

characteristic of American self-appreciation: they always go straight

to the best. The haughty forewoman was bored at first, but when she

had languidly inspected a few of Cynthia’s sketches she was roused to

interest if not enthusiasm. Two days later, Cynthia took her position

as “designer for _jeunne filles_” at L----’s, at a salary which even

for New York was considerable.

Hence the capital. The _clientèle_ developed inevitably, and was soon

excuse in itself for the girl to start a place of her own. At the

end of her third year in New York, she saw her dream of independence

realized in a _chic_ little shop marked _Brand_; at the end of her

fifth the shop had evolved into an establishment of three stories.

And ten years after the girl with her thirty dollars arrived at an

East Side boarding-house, she put up a sky-scraper--at any rate an

eleven-story building--of her own; while the hall bedroom at the

boarding-house is become a beautiful apartment on Central Park West.

And meanwhile someone made the discovery that Cynthia Brand was one

of _the_ Brands of Richmond, and Society took her up. Today she is a

personage, as well as one of the keenest business women, in New York.

Marvellous, but a unique experience, you say. Unique only in degree of

success, not in the fact itself. There are hundreds, even thousands,

of Cynthia Brands plying their prosperous trades in the American

commercial capital. As photographers, decorators, restaurant and

tea-room proprietors, jewellers, florists, and specialists of every

kind, these enterprising women are calmly proving that the home is by

no means their only sphere; that in the realm of economics at least

they are the equals both in energy and intelligence of their comrade

man.

It is interesting to contrast this strongly feminist attitude of the

American woman with the suffragism of her militant British sister.

No two methods of obtaining the same result could be more different.

Years ago the American woman emancipated herself, without ostentation

or outcry, by quietly taking her place in the commonwealth as a

bread-winner. Voluntarily she stepped down from the pedestal (to which,

however, her sentimental _confrère_ promptly re-raised her), and set

about claiming her share in the business of life. To disregard her now

would be futile. She is too important; she has made herself too vital

a factor in economic activity to be disregarded when it comes to civic

matters.

And so, while Englishwomen less progressive in the true sense of the

word have been window-smashing and setting fires, the “rights” they so

ardently desire have been tranquilly and naturally acquired by their

shrewder American cousins. Fifteen of the forty-odd States now have

universal suffrage; almost every State has suffrage in some form. And

it will be a very short time--perhaps ten years, perhaps fifteen--until

all of the great continent will come under the equal rule of men and

women alike.

I had the interesting privilege of witnessing the mammoth Suffrage

Parade in New York, just before the presidential election last fall.

In more than one way, it was a revelation. After the jeering, hooting

mob at the demonstrations in Hyde Park, this absorbed, respectful crowd

that lined both sides of Fifth Avenue was even more impressive than the

procession of women itself. But seeing the latter as they marched past

twenty thousand strong gave the key to the enthusiasm of the crowd.

A fresh-faced, well-dressed, composed company of women; women of all

ages--college girls, young matrons, middle-aged mothers with their

daughters, elderly ladies and even dowagers, white-haired and hearty,

made up the inspiring throng. They greeted the cheers of the spectators

smilingly, yet with dignity; their own cheers no less ardent for being

orderly and restrained; and about their whole bearing was a sanity and

good sense, joined to a thoroughly feminine wish to please, which gave

away the secret of their popularity.

It was the American woman at her best, which means the American woman

with a steady, splendid purpose which she intends to accomplish,

and in which she enlists not only the support but the sympathy of

her fellow-men. With her own unique cleverness she goes about it.

President-elect Wilson stole into Washington the day before his

inauguration, almost unnoticed, because everyone was off to welcome

“General” Rosalie Jones and her company of petitioners: instead of

kidnapping the President (as her English sisters would have planned),

the astute young woman kidnapped the people; winning them entirely by

her sturdy good humour and daring combined, and refusing to part with a

jot of her femininity in the process.

If I have seemed to contradict myself in this brief analysis of so

complex and interesting a character as the American woman, I can only

go back to my first statement that she herself is a contradiction--only

definite within her individual type. The type of the mere woman of

pleasure, which implies the woman of wealth, I confess to finding

the extreme of vapidity and selfishness, as Americans are always the

extreme of something. This is the type the foreigner knows by heart,

and despises. But the American woman of intelligence, the woman of

clear vision, fine aim, and splendid accomplishment, he does not know;

for she is at home, earning her living.

[Illustration:

_Underwood & Underwood_

AMERICAN WOMAN GOES TO WAR!

(MARCH OF THE SUFFRAGISTS ON WASHINGTON)]

V

MATRIMONY & CO.

Of all the acts which America has in solution, marriage is as yet the

most unsatisfactory, the least organized. It is easy to dismiss it

with a vague wave of the hand, and the slighting “Oh, yes--the divorce

evil.” But really to understand the problem, with all its complex

difficulties, one must go a great deal further--into the thought and

simple animal feeling of the people who harbour the divorce evil.

Physiologically speaking, Americans are made up of nerves;

psychologically they are made up of sentiment: a volatile combination,

fatal to steadiness or logic of expression. We have spoken of the

everyday habit of contact among them, the trifling touch that passes

unheeded between young men and girls, from childhood into maturity.

This is but a single phase of that diffuseness of sex energy, which

being distributed through a variety of channels, with the American,

nowhere is very profound or vital. The constant comradeship between

the two sexes, from babyhood throughout all life, makes for many fine

things; but it does not make for passion. And, as though dimly they

realize this, Americans--both men and women--seem desperately bent on

manufacturing it.

Hence their suggestive songs, their suggestive books, their crudely

suggestive plays, and, above all, their recognized game of “teasing,”

in which the young girl uses every device for plaguing the young

man--to lead him on, but never to lead him too far. Always suggestion,

never realization; as a nation they retain the adolescent point of

view to the end, playing with sex, which they do not understand, but

only vaguely feel, yet about which they have the typically adolescent

curiosity.

So much for the physiological side. It is not hard to understand how

under such conditions natural animal energy is dissipated along a

hundred avenues of mere nerve excitement and satisfaction; so that when

it comes to marriage the American man or woman can have no stored-up

wealth of passion to bestow, but simply the usual comradeship, the

usual contact intensified. This is all very well, to begin with, but

it is too slender a bond to stand the strain of daily married life.

Besides, there is the ingrained craving for novelty that has been fed

and fostered by lifelong freedom of intercourse until it is become in

itself a passion dangerously strong. A few misunderstandings, a serious

quarrel or two, and the couple who a year ago swore to cleave to one

another till death are eager to part with one another for life--and to

pass on to something new.

But a formidable stumbling-block confronts them: their ideal of

marriage. Sentiment comes to the front, outraged and demanding

appeasement. American life is grounded in sentiment. The idea of the

American man concerning the American woman, the idea of the woman

concerning the man, is a colossus of sentiment in itself. She is

all-pure, he is all-chivalrous. She would not smoke a cigarette (in

public) because he would be horrified; he would not confess to a

_liason_ (however many it might please him to enjoy), because she

would perish with shame. Each has made it a life business to forget

that the other is human, and to insist that both are impeccable. When,

therefore, before the secret tribunal of matrimony, this illusion is

condemned to death, what is to be done?

Nothing that could reflect on the innocence of the woman, or the

blamelessness of the man. In other words, the public ideal still must

be upheld. With which the public firmly agrees; and, always willing

to be hoodwinked and to hoodwink itself, makes a neat series of laws

whereby men and women may enjoy unlimited license and still remain

irreproachable. Thus the difficulty is solved, sentiment is satisfied,

and chaos mounts the throne.

I am always extremely interested in the American disgust at the

Continental marriage system. Here the inveterate sentimentalism of the

nation comes out most decided and clear. In the first place, they say,

the European has no respect for women; he orders them about, or betrays

them, with equal coolness and cruelty. He is mercenary to the last

degree in the matter of the _dot_, but himself after marriage makes

no effort to provide his wife with more than pin-money. After the

honeymoon she becomes his housekeeper and the mother of his children;

while he spends her dowry on a succession of mistresses and immoral

amusements elsewhere.

All of which, as generalization, is true. The complementary series of

facts, however, the American complacently ignores. He knows nothing,

for instance, of the European attitude to the young girl--how could

he? His own sisters and daughters are presented, even before they

are in long skirts, as objects of intimacy and flirtation; harmless

flirtation, admitted, yet scarcely the thing to produce reverence for

the recipient. Instead she is given a free-and-easy consideration,

which to the European is appalling. The latter may be a rake and a

_debauché_, but he has one religion ingrained and unimpeachable: in

the presence of a young girl he is before an altar. And throughout all

European life the young girl is accorded a delicate dignity impossible

to her less sheltered American cousin.

What good does that do her, asks the downright American, if the minute

she marries she becomes a slave? On the contrary, she gains her

liberty, where the American girl (in her own opinion at least) loses

hers; but even if she did not it is a matter open to dispute as to

which is better off in any case: the woman who is a slave, or the woman

who is master? For contentment and serenity, one must give the palm to

the European. She brings her husband money instead of marrying him for

his; she stands over herself and her expenditure, rather than over him

and his check-book; and she tends her house and bears children, rather

than roams the world in search of pleasure. Yet she is happy.

She may be deceived by her husband; if so, she is deceived far without

the confines of her own home. Within her home, as mother of her

husband’s children, she is impregnable. She may be betrayed, but she

is never vulgarized; her affairs are not dragged through the divorce

court, or jaunted about the columns of a yellow press. Whatever she

may not be to the man whom she has married, she is once and forever

the woman with whom he shares his name, and to whom he must give

his unconditional respect--or kill her. She has so much, sure and

inviolate, to stand on.

The American woman has nothing sure. In a land where all things change

with the sun, die and are shoved along breathlessly to make room for

new, she is lost in the general confusion. Today she is Mrs. Smith,

tomorrow--by her own wish, or Mr. Smith’s, or both--she is Mrs. Jones,

six months later she is Mrs. Somebody Else; and the conversation, which

includes “your children,” “my children,” and “our children,” is not a

joke in America: it is an everyday fact--for the children themselves a

tragedy.

Young people grow up among such conditions with a flippant--even

a horrible--idea of marriage. They look upon it, naturally, as an

expedient; something temporarily good, to be entered upon as such,

and without any profound thought for the future. “She married very

well,” means she married dollars, or position, or a title; in the

person of what, it does not matter. If she is dissatisfied with her

bargain, she always makes an exchange, and no one will think any the

worse of her. For, while Americans are horror-stricken at the idea

of a woman’s having a lover without the law, within the law she may

have as many as she likes, and take public sympathy and approval along

with her; so long as the farce of her _purity_ is carried out, these

sentimentalists (whom Meredith calls, in general, “self-worshippers”)

smile complaisance.

It is simply another light on the prevailing superficiality that

controls them, for that a woman shall be faithful--where she has

placed her affections of whatever sort--they neither demand nor appear

to think of at all. She may ruin her husband buying chiffons, or

maintaining an establishment beyond his means, and not a word of blame

is attached to her; on the contrary, when the husband goes bankrupt,

it is he who is outcast, while everyone speaks pitifully of “his poor

wife.” The only allegiance expected of the woman is the mere allegiance

of the body; and this in the American woman is no virtue, for she has

little or no passion to tempt her to bodily sin.

Rather, as we have seen, she is a highly nervous organism, demanding

nerve food in the shape of sensation--constant and varied. Emotionally,

she is a sort of psychic vampire, always athirst for victims to her

vanity; experience from which to gain new knowledge of herself.

This is true not only of the idle woman of society, but of the

best and intentionally most sincere. They are wholly unconscious

of it, they would indignantly refute it; yet their very system of

living proves it: throughout all classes the American woman, in the

majority, is sufficient unto herself, and--no matter in how noble a

spirit--self-absorbed.

If she is happily married, she loves her husband; but why? Because he

harmoniously complements the nature she is bent on developing. In like

fashion she loves her children--do they not contribute a tremendous

portion towards the perfect womanhood she ardently desires? And this

is not saying that the finer type of American woman is not a devoted

mother and wife; it is giving the deep, unconscious motive of her

devotion.

But take the finer type that is not married, that remains unmarried

voluntarily, and by the thousands. Take the Cynthia Brands, for

example. Americans say they stay single because “they have too good

a time,” and this is literally true. Why should they marry when they

can compass of themselves the things women generally marry for--secure

position and a comfortable home? Why, except for overpowering love

of some particular man? This the Cynthia Brands--_i. e._, women

independently successful--are seldom apt to experience. All their

energy is trained upon themselves and their ambition; and that is

never satisfied, but pushes on and on, absorbing emotion--every sort

of force in the woman--till her passion becomes completely subjective,

and marriage has nothing to offer her save the children she willingly

renounces.

Thus there is in America almost a third sex: a sex of superwomen,

in whom mentality triumphs to the sacrifice of the normal female.

One cannot say that this side of the generally admirable “self-made”

woman is appealing. It is rather hard, and leads one to speculate as

to whether the victorious bachelor girl of today is on the whole more

attractive or better off than the despised spinster of yesterday.

Of course, she has raised and strengthened the position of women,

economically speaking; socially, too. But one cannot but think that

she is after all only a partially finished superwoman, and that the

ultimate creature will have more of sweetness and strong tenderness

than one sees in the determined, rather rigid faces of the army of New

York business women of the present.

As for the New York man (whom one is forever slighting because his

rôle is so inconspicuous), we have a type much less complex--quite the

simplest type of normal male, in fact. The average New Yorker (that is,

the New Yorker of the upper middle class) is a hard-working, obvious

soul, of obvious qualities and obvious flaws. His _raison d’être_ is to

provide prodigally for his wife and children; to which end he steals

out of the house in the morning before the rest are awake, and returns

late in the evening, hurriedly to dress and accompany Madame to some

smart restaurant and the play.

[Illustration:

_Underwood & Underwood_

THE TRIUMPHANT “THIRD SEX” TAKES WASHINGTON]

Here, as at the opera or fashionable reception, his duty is simply

that of background to the elaborate gorgeousness and inveterate

animation of his womenfolk. Indeed, throughout all their activities the

American husband and wife seem curiously irrelevant to one another:

they work as a tandem, not as a team. And there is no question as to

who goes first. The wife indicates the route; the husband does his

best to keep up to her. If he cannot do it, no matter what his other

excellences, he is a failure. He himself is convinced of it, hence his

tense expression of straining every nerve toward some gigantic end that

usually he is just able to compass.

The man who cannot support a woman, not in reasonable comfort, but in

the luxury she expects, thinks he has no right to her. The woman has

taught him to think it. Thus a young friend of mine, who on twenty-five

thousand a year had been engaged to a charming New York girl, told me,

simply, that of course when his income was reduced to five thousand he

could not marry her.

I asked what the girl thought about it. “Oh, she’s a trump,” he said

enthusiastically; “she wouldn’t throw me over because I’ve lost my

money. But of course she sees it’s impossible. We couldn’t go the pace.”

From which ingenuous confession we rightly gather that “the pace”

comes first with both husband and wife, in New York; the person of

one another second, if it counts at all. Their great bond of union

is the building up of certain material circumstances both covet;

their home life, their friends, their instinctive and lavish

hospitality--everything is regulated according to this. Instead of a

peaceful evening in their own drawing-room, after the man’s strenuous

day at the office, the woman’s no less strenuous day at bridge and the

dressmaker’s, they must rush into evening clothes and hasten to show

themselves where they should be seen. Other people’s pleasures become

to the American couple stern duties; to be feverishly followed, if it

helps them in ever so little toward their goal.

Thus we hear Mrs. Grey say to George: “Don’t forget we’re dining with

the Fred Baynes’ tonight. Be home early.”

“The deuce we are!” says George. “I wanted to go to the club. I detest

Bayne, anyhow.”

“Yes, but he’s President of the _Security Trust_. If you want to get

their new contract, you’d best dine, and get him to promise you. I’ve

already lunched her, so the ground’s prepared.”

“Oh, very well,” growls George; “of course you’re right. I’ll be on

hand.”

Result: They cement a friendship with two odious people whom they are

afterward obliged to invite; but George gets the contract, and twenty

thousand goes down to the family bank account. This spirit is by no

means unknown in English and Continental life, but certainly it has

its origin and prime exponents in America. No other people finds money

sufficient exchange for perpetual boredom.

The European goes where he is amused, with friends who interest him.

He dares. The American does not; having always to prove that he can

afford to be in certain places, that he is of sufficient importance to

be with certain people. America is full of ruinously expensive resorts

that have sprung up in response to this craving for self-advertisement

on the part of her “rising” sons and daughters. Squads of newspaper

reporters go with them, and the nation is kept accurately informed to

the minute as to what Mrs. Spender wore this morning at Palm Beach,

Mrs. Haveall at Newport, Mrs. Dash at Hot Springs; also how many

horses, motor cars, yachts and petty paraphernalia Charles Spender,

Jimmy Haveall, and Henry Dash are carrying about. The credit of these

men, together often with the credit of large business firms, depends on

the show they can afford to make, and the jewels their wives wear.

But I believe that no man has a duller life than the rich man--or

the moderately rich man of New York. He is generally the victim of

dyspepsia--from too rich food taken in too great a hurry; he is always

the victim of the office. Not even after he has retired, to spend

the remainder of his days in dreary luxury between his clubs and

Continental watering places, does the office habit cease to torment

him. Once and forever, it has murdered the enjoyment of leisure and

annihilated pleasure in peace.

Being naturally heavy-minded on all subjects except business, the

American man with time on his hands is in a pitiable plight. I have

met some of these poor gentlemen, wandering helplessly about the world

with their major-general wives, and I must say they are among the

most pathetic of married men. They hibernate in hotel lounges, smoking

their enormous cigars and devouring their two-weeks-old New York

newspapers; or, when they get the chance, monologuing by the hour on

their past master strokes in the land where “things hum.” Sometimes in

self-defence against the wife’s frocks and French hats, they have a

hobby: ivories, or old silver--something eminently respectable. If so,

they are apt to be laborious about it, as they are about all culture

which they graft on themselves, or have grafted on them. Sometimes they

turn their attention to sport; but the real sport of the American, man

and woman, is climbing. It is born in them, and they never actually

give it up until they die.

Meanwhile the couple who have resisted divorce and continued to climb

together turn anxious eyes on the upward advance of their children.

If the latter make a false step, mother with her trained wit must

repair it; father must foot the bill. No more extravagantly indulgent

parent exists than the American parent who himself has had to make his

own way. His children are monarchs, weightedly crowned with luxuries

they do not appreciate; and for them he slaves till death or nervous

prostration lays him low. One wonders when the nation that has lost its

head over the American girl will awake to the discovery of the American

father. For the present he is a silent, deprecatory creature, toiling

unceasingly six days of the week, and on the seventh to be found in

some unfrequented corner of the house, inundated by newspapers, or

unobtrusively building blocks in the nursery--where there is one.

As a rule, American children own the house, monopolize the conversation

at meals, which almost invariably they take with their elders--whether

there are guests or not, and are generally as arrogant and precocious

little tyrants as unlimited indulgence and admiration can make them.

They have been allowed to see and read everything their parents see and

read; they have been taken to the theatre and about the world, from

the time they could walk; they have, many of them, travelled abroad,

and are ready to discuss Paris or London with the languid nonchalance

of little old men and women; on the whole, these poor spoiled little

people, through no fault of their own, are about as unpleasant and

unnatural a type as can be found.

Instead of being kept simple and unsophisticated they are early

inculcated with the importance of money and the things it can buy.

American boys, rather than vying with one another in tennis or

swimming vie with one another in the number of motor cars they own or

sail-boats or saddle-horses, as the case may be. They would scorn the

pony that is the English boy’s delight, but it is true that many young

Americans at the tender age of twelve own their own motors, which they

drive and discuss with the _blasé_ air of men of the world. In like

fashion the little girls, from the time they can toddle, are consumed

with the idea of outdressing one another; and even give box parties

and luncheons--beginning, almost before they are out of the cradle,

to imitate their mothers in ambition and the consuming spirit of

competition.

Naturally, one is speaking of the children of the wealthy, or at

least well off; among the children of the working classes, whatever

their grade of intelligence or education, we find the same sturdy

independence and ability that characterizes their mothers and fathers.

But all American children are sophisticated--one glance at a daily

newspaper is enough to make them so; and they live in an atmosphere

of worldly wisdom and knowledge of the sordid, which those of us who

believe that childhood should be ingenuous and gay find rather sad.

The little pitchers, in this case, have not only big ears but eyes and

wits sharp to perceive the sorry things they would naturally learn soon

enough.

They are allowed to wander, unshielded, among the perplexing mixed

motives, the standards in disarray, of this theatre where life in its

myriad relations is still in adjustment. Like small troubled gnomes

seeking light, they flit across the hazardous stage; where their

more experienced leaders have yet to extricate order out of a sea of

sentimental hypocrisies, inflated ideals, and makeshift laws.

American men and women have been at great pains to construct “a world

not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.” They have

obstinately refused to admit one another as they actually are--which,

after all, is a remarkably fine race of beings; preferring the

pretty flimsiness of a house of cards of their own making to the

indestructible mansion of humanity. When their passion for inventing

shall be converted into an equally ardent passion for reflecting--as it

surely will be--they will see their mistake in a trice; and, from that

time, they are destined to be not a collection of finely tuned nervous

organisms, but a splendid race of thinking creatures.

II

THE CURTAIN RISES

(Paris)

I

ON THE GREAT ARTISTE

Out of the turmoil and struggling confusion of rehearsal, to gaze on

the finished performance of the great _artiste_! For in Paris we are

before the curtain, not behind it; and few foreigners, though they may

adopt the city for their own, and lovingly study it for many years, are

granted more than an occasional rare glimpse of its personality without

the stage between. From that safe distance, Paris coquets with you,

rails at you, laughs and weeps for you; but first she has handed you a

programme, which informs you that she does the same for all the world,

at a certain hour each day, and for a fixed price. And if ever in the

ardour of your admiration you show signs of forgetting, of seeking her

personal favour by a rash gesture or smile, she points you imperiously

to the barricade of the footlights--or vanishes completely, in the

haughtiness of her ire.

Therefore, the tourist will tell you, Paris is not satisfactory.

Because to his greedy curiosity she does not open her soul as she does

the gates of her art treasures and museums, he pronounces her shallow,

mercenary, heartless, even wicked. As her frankness in some things

is foreign to his hypocrisy, as her complex unmorality resists his

facile analysis, he grasps what he can of her; and goes away annoyed.

Really to know Paris is to offer in advance a store of tolerance for

her inconsistencies, patience for her whims, and the sincere desire to

learn finally to see behind her mask--not to snatch it rudely from her

face.

But this cannot be done in the curt fortnight which generally limits

the casual visitor’s acquaintance. Months and years must be spent,

if true knowledge of the City of Light is to be won. We can only, in

our brief survey of its more significant phases, indicate a guide to

further study of a place and people well worth a wider scrutiny.

The most prejudiced will not deny that Paris is beautiful; or that

there is about her streets and broad, tree-lined avenues a graciousness

at once dignified and gay. Stand, as the ordinary tourist does on

his first day, in the flowering square before the Louvre; in the

foreground are the fountains and bright tulip-bordered paths of the

Tuileries--here a glint of gold, there a soft flash of marble statuary,

shining through the trees; in the centre the round lake where the

children sail their boats. Beyond spreads the wide sweep of the Place

de la Concorde, with its obelisk of terrible significance, its larger

fountains throwing brilliant jets of spray; and then the trailing,

upward vista of the Champs Elysées to the great triumphal Arch: yes,

even to the most indifferent, Paris is beautiful.

To the subtler of appreciation, she is more than beautiful: she is

impressive. For behind the studied elegance of architecture, the

elaborate simplicity of gardens, the carefully lavish use of sculpture

and delicate spray, is visible the imagination of a race of passionate

creators--the imagination, throughout, of the great artist. One meets

it at every turn and corner, down dim passageways, up steep hills,

across bridges, along sinuous quays: the masterhand and its “infinite

capacity for taking pains.” And so marvellously do its manifestations

of many periods through many ages combine to enhance one another that

one is convinced that the genius of Paris has been perennial; that St.

Genevieve, her godmother, bestowed it as an immortal gift when the city

was born.

From earliest days every man seems to have caught the spirit of

the man who came before, and to have perpetuated it; by adding his

own distinctive yet always harmonious contribution to the gradual

development of the whole. One built a stately avenue; another erected

a church at the end; a third added a garden on the other side of the

church, and terraces leading up to it; a fourth and fifth cut streets

that should give from the remaining two sides into other flowery

squares with their fine edifices. And so from every viewpoint, and from

every part of the entire city, today we have an unbroken series of

vistas--each one different and more charming than the last.

History has lent its hand to the process, too; and romance--it is not

an insipid chain of flowerbeds we have to follow, but the holy warriors

of Saint Louis, the roistering braves of Henry the Great, the gallant

Bourbons, the ill-starred Bonapartes. These as they passed have left

their monuments; it may be only in a crumbling old chapel or ruined

tower, but there they are: eloquent of days that are dead, of a spirit

that lives forever staunch in the heart of the fervent French people.

It comes over one overwhelmingly sometimes, in the midst of the

careless gaiety of the modern city: the old, ever-burning spirit of

rebellion and savage strife that underlies it all; and that can spring

to the surface now on certain memorable days, with a vehemence that is

terrifying. Look across the Pont Alexandre, at the serene gold dome

of the Invalides, surrounded by its sleepy barracks. Suddenly you are

in the fires and awful slaughter of Napoleon’s wars. The flower of

France is being pitilessly cut down for the lust of one man’s ambition;

and when that is spent, and the wail of the widowed country pierces

heaven with its desolation, a costly asylum is built for the handful of

soldiers who are left--and the great Emperor has done his duty!

Or you are walking through the Cité, past the court of the Palais

de Justice. You glance in, carelessly--memory rushes upon you--and

the court flows with blood, “so that men waded through it, up to the

knees!” In the tiny stone-walled room yonder, Marie Antoinette sits

disdainfully composed before her keepers; though her face is white with

the sounds she hears, as her friends and followers are led out to swell

that hideous river of blood.

A pretty, artificial city, Paris; good for shopping, and naughty

amusements, now and then. History? Oh yes, of course; but all that’s so

dry and uninspiring, and besides it happened so long ago.

Did it? In your stroll along the Rue Royale, among the jewellers’ and

milliners’ shops and Maxim’s, glance up at the Madeleine, down at the

obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Little over a hundred years ago,

this was the brief distance between life and death for those who one

minute were dancing in the “Temple of Victory,” the next were laying

their heads upon the block of the guillotine. Can you see, beyond the

shadowy grey pillars of the Temple, that brilliant circling throng

within? The reckless-laughing ballet girl in her shrine as “Goddess,”

her worshippers treading their wild measures among the candles and

crucifixes and holy images, as though they are pursued? Look--a grim

presence is at the door. He enters, lays a heavy hand upon the shoulder

of a young and beautiful dancer. She looks into his face, and smiles.

The music never stops, but goes more madly on; as the one demanded

makes a low _révérence_, then rising, throws a kiss over her shoulder

to her comrades who in turn salute her; calls a gay “Adieu!” and with

the smile still terrible upon her lips--is gone.

Ah, but the French are different now, you say. Those were the

aristocrats, the _vieille noblesse_; these modern Republicans are of

another breed. And yet the same blood flows in their veins, the same

scornful courage animates them--who, for example, leads the world in

aviation?--and on days like the fourteenth of July (the anniversary

of the storming of the Bastille), the common people at least show a

patriotism no less fiery if less ferocious than they showed in 1789.

Let us see if they are so different after all.

The first charge against the French invariably is that of

artificiality. Anglo-Saxons admit them to be charming, of a delightful

wit and keen intelligence; but, they immediately add, how deep does it

go? Superficially, the Parisian is vastly agreeable; courteous to the

point of extravagance, an accomplished conversationalist, even now and

then with a flash of the profound. Probe him, and what do you find? A

cynical, world-weary degenerate, who will laugh at you when your back

is turned, and make love to your wife before your very eyes!

[Illustration: AN OPEN-AIR BALL ON THE 14TH JULY]

And why not? You should appreciate the compliment to your good

taste. It is when he begins to make love behind one’s back that one

must beware of one’s French friend; for he is a finished artist at

the performance, and women know it, and are prepared in advance to

be subdued. He is by no means a degenerate, however, the average

Frenchman; he has to work too hard, and besides he has not the money

degeneracy costs. He may have his “_petite amie_,” generally he

has; but quite as generally she is a wholesome, well-behaved little

person,--a dressmaker in a small way, or _vendeuse_ in a shop--content

to drink a bock with him in the evening, at their favourite café, and

on Sundays to hang on his arm during their excursion to St. Germain or

Meudon. Just as a very small percentage of New Yorkers are those who

dwell in Wall Street and corner stocks, so a very small percentage of

Parisians are those who feed _louis_ to night restaurants and carouse

till morning with riotous demi-mondaines.

It is a platitude that foreigners are the ones who support the immoral

resorts of Paris; yet no foreigner seems to care to remember the

platitude. The best way to convince oneself of it forever is to visit

a series of these places, and take honest note of their personnel. The

employés will be found to be French; but ninety-eight per cent. of the

patrons are English, German, Italian, Spanish, and North and South

American. The retort is made that nevertheless the Parisians started

such establishments in the first place. They did; but only after the

stranger had brought his crude sensuality to their variety theatres

and night cafés, stripping the first of their racy wit, the second of

their rollicking _bonhomie_, taking note only of the license underlying

both--and blatantly revelling in it. Then it was that the ever-alert

commercial sense of the Frenchman awoke to a new method of making money

out of foreigners; and the vulgar night-restaurant of today had its

beginning.

But not only in the matter of degeneracy is the common analysis of the

Parisian open to refutation; his inveterate cynicism also comes up

for doubt. The attitude that calls forth this mistaken conclusion on

the part of those not well acquainted with French character is more

or less the attitude of every instinctively dramatic nature: a kind

of impersonal detachment, which causes the individual to appreciate

situations and events first as bits of drama, _seen_ in their relation

to himself. Thus, during the recent scandal of the motor bandits, I

have heard policemen laugh heartily at some clever trick of evasion on

the part of the criminals; only to see them turn purple with rage the

next minute, on realizing the insult to their own intelligence.

A better example is the story of the little _midinette_ who, though

starving, would not yield to her former _patron_ (desirous also of

being her lover), and whom the latter shot through the heart as she was

hurrying along the Quai Passy late at night. “_Quel phenomène_!” she

exclaimed, with a faint shrug, as her life ebbed away in the corner

_brasserie_; “to be shot, while on the way to drown oneself--_c’est

inoui_!” The next moment she was dead. And all she had to say was,

“what a phenomenon--it’s unheard of!”

Is this cynicism? Or is it not rather the characteristic impersonality

of the histrionic temper, which causes the artist, even in death, to

gaze at herself and at the scene, as it were, from the critical vantage

of the wings? And the light shrug--which so often grounds the idea of

heartlessness, or simply of shallow frivolity, in the judgment of the

stranger--look closer, and you will see it hiding a brave stoicism that

this race of born actors makes every effort to conceal. The French

throughout embody so complex a combination of Latin ardour, Spartan

endurance, and Greek ideality as to render them extremely difficult of

any but the most superficial comprehension. They laugh at things that

make other people shudder; they take fire at things that leave other

people cold; they burn with a white flame for beauties other people

never see. As a great English writer has said, “below your level,

they’re above it:--and a paradox is at home with them!”

But I do not think that they are always ridiculing the foreigner, when

the latter is uncomfortably conscious of their smiling glance upon

him. There are travelling types at whom everyone laughs, and these

delight the Frenchman’s keen humour; but the ordinary stranger has

become so commonplace to Paris that, unless he or she is especially

distinguished, no one takes any notice. Here, however, we have in

a nutshell the reason for that smile that sometimes irritates the

foreigner: it is often a smile of pure admiration. The great artist’s

eye knows no distinction of nationality or an iota of provincial

prejudice. When it lights upon ugliness, it is disgusted--or amused,

if the ugliness has a touch of the comic; when, on the other hand, it

lights upon beauty--and how instant it is to spy out the most obscure

trait of this--enthusiasm is kindled, regardless of kind or race, and

the _vif_ French features break into a smile of pleased appreciation.

Here, he would say, is someone who contributes to the scene; someone

who helps to make, not mar, the radiant _ensemble_ we are striving for.

Paris, as no other city in the world, offers a playhouse of brilliant

and charming _mise-en-scène_; and gives the visitor subtly to

understand that she expects him to live up to it. Otherwise she has

no interest in him. For the well-tailored Englishman, the striking

_Américaine_, for anyone and everyone who can claim title to that

supreme quality, _chic_, Paris is ready to open her arms and cry

kinship. Those whom she favours, however, are held strictly to the mark

of her fine standard of the exquisite; and if they falter--oblivion.

“I am never in Paris two hours,” said an American friend of mine,

“before I begin to perk and prink, and furbish up everything I have.

One feels that each man and woman in the street knows the very buttons

of one’s gloves, and quality of one’s stockings; and that every detail

of one’s costume _must_ be right.” Many people have voiced the same

impression: as of being consciously and constantly “on view”--before

spectators keenly critical. The curtain seems to rise on oneself alone

in the centre of the stage, and never to go down until the last pair of

those appraising eyes has passed on.