She has meanwhile probably her hours of amazement at the size of her
windfall; she cannot quite live without wonder at the oddity of her so
“sleeping” partner, the strange creature, by her side, with his values
and his voids, but who is best known to her as having yielded what she
would have clutched to the death. Yet these are mere mystic, inscrutable
possibilities—dreams, for us, of her hushed, shrouded hours: the face
she shows, on all the facts, is that of mere unwinking tribute to the
matter of course. The effect of these high signs of assurance in her has
been—and it is really her master-stroke—to represent the situation as
perfectly normal. Her companion’s attitude, totally destitute of high
signs, does everything it can to further this feat; so that, as disposed
together in the American picture, they testify, extraordinarily, to the
_successful_ rupture of a universal law, the sight is at first, for
observation, most mystifying. Then the impunity of the whole thing gains
upon us; the equilibrium strikes us, however strangely, as at least
provisionally stable; we see that a society in many respects workable
would seem to have been arrived at, and that we shall in any case have
time to study it. The phenomenon may easily become, for a spectator, the
sentence written largest in the American sky: when he is in search of
the characteristic, what else so plays the part? The woman is two-thirds
of the apparent life—which means that she is absolutely all of the
social; and, as this is nowhere else the case, the occasion is unique
for seeing what such a situation may make of her. The result elsewhere,
in Europe generally, of conditions in which men have actively
participated and to which, throughout, they personally contribute, she
has only the old story to tell, and keeps telling it after her fashion.
The woman produced by a women-made society alone has obviously quite a
new story—to which it is not for a moment to be gainsaid that the world
at large has, for the last thirty years in particular, found itself
lending an attentive, at times even a charmed, ear. The extent and
variety of this attention have been the specious measure of the personal
success of the type in question, and are always referred to when its
value happens to be challenged. “The American woman?—why, she has
beguiled, she has conquered, the globe: look at her fortune everywhere
and fail to accept her if you can.”
She has been, accordingly, about the globe, beyond all doubt, a huge
success of curiosity; she has at her best—and far beyond any
consciousness and intention of her own, lively as these for the most
part usually are—infinitely amused the nations. It has been found among
them that, for more reasons than we can now go into, her manner of
embodying and representing her sex has fairly made of her a new human
convenience, not unlike fifty of the others, of a slightly different
order, the ingenious mechanical appliances, stoves, refrigerators,
sewing-machines, type-writers, cash-registers, that have done so much,
in the household and the place of business, for the American name. By
which I am of course far from meaning that the revelation has been of
her utility as a domestic drudge; it has been much rather in the fact
that the advantages attached to her being a woman at all have been so
happily combined with the absence of the drawbacks, for persons
intimately dealing with her, traditionally suggested by that condition.
The corresponding advantages, in the light of almost any old order, have
always seemed inevitably paid for by the drawbacks; but here,
unmistakably, was a case in which—as at first appeared, certainly—they
were to be enjoyed very nearly for nothing. What it came to, evidently,
was that she had been grown in an air in which a hundred of the
“European” complications and dangers didn’t exist, and in which also she
had had to take upon herself a certain training for freedom. It was not
that she had had, in the vulgar sense, to “look out” for herself,
inasmuch as it was of the very essence of her position not to be
threatened or waylaid; but that she could develop her audacity on the
basis of her security, just as she could develop her “powers” in a
medium from which criticism was consistently absent. Thus she arrived,
full-blown, on the general scene, the least criticized object, in
proportion to her importance, that had ever adorned it. It would take
long to say why her situation, under this retrospect, may affect the
inner fibre of the critic himself as one of the most touching on record;
he may merely note his perception that she was to have been after all
but the sport of fate. For why need she originally, he wonders, have
embraced so confidently, so gleefully, yet so unguardedly, the terms
offered her to an end practically so perfidious? Why need she, unless in
the interest of her eventual discipline, have turned away with so light
a heart after watching the Man, the deep American man, retire into his
tent and let down the flap? She had her “paper” from him, their
agreement signed and sealed; but would she not, in some other air and
under some other sky, have been visited by a saving instinct? Would she
not have said “No, this is too unnatural; there must be a trap in it
somewhere—it’s addressed really, in the long run, to making a fool of
me?” It is impossible, of course, to tell; and her case, as it stands
for us, at any rate, is that she showed no doubts. It is not on the
American scene and in the presence of mere American phenomena that she
is even yet to be observed as showing them; but does not my digression
find itself meanwhile justified by the almost clear certainty that the
first symptoms of the revulsion—of the _con_vulsion, I am tempted to
say—must break out in Washington?
For here—and it is what I have been so long in coming to—here alone in
the American world, do we catch the other sex not observing the
agreement. I have described this anomaly, at Washington, as that of
Man’s socially “existing”; since we have seen that his fidelity to his
compact throughout the country in general has involved his not doing so.
What has happened, obviously, has been that his reasons, at a stroke,
have dropped, and that he finds himself, without them, a different
creature. He has discovered that he _can_ exist in other connections
than that of the Market, and that all he has therefore to settle is the
question of whether he may. The most delicate interest of Washington is
the fact that it is quite practically _being_ settled there—in the
practical way which is yet also the dramatic. _Solvitur ambulando_; it
is being settled—that is the charm—as it goes, settled without
discussion. It would be awkward and gross to say that Man has dealt any
conscious blow at the monopoly of his companion, or that her prestige,
as mistress of the situation, has suffered in any manner a noted
abatement. Yet none the less, as he has there, in a degree, socially
found himself and, allured by the new sense, is evidently destined to
seek much further still, the sensible effect, the change of impression
on one’s coming from other places, is of the most marked. Man is
solidly, vividly present, and the presence of Woman has consequently,
for the proposed intensity, to reckon with it. The omens on behalf of
the former appearance are just now strikingly enhanced, as happens, by
the accident of the rare quality, as it were, of the particular male
presence supremely presiding there; and it would certainly be strange
that this idea of the re-committal to masculine hands of some share at
least in the interests of civilization, some part of the social property
and social office, should not, from so high an example, have received a
new impulse and a new consecration. Easily enough, if we had space here
to consider it, might come up the whole picture of the new indications
thus afforded, the question of the degree in which a sex capable, in the
American air, of having so despoiled itself may really be capable of
retracing its steps and repairing its mistake. It would appear
inevitable to ask whether such a mistake on such a scale _can_ prove
effectively reparable—whether ground so lost can be effectively
recovered. Has not the American woman, with such a start, gained such an
irreducible advance, on the whole high plane of the amenities, that her
companion will never catch up with her? This last is an inquiry that I
must, alas, brush aside, though feeling it, as I have already noted,
_the_ most oddly interesting that the American spectacle proposes to us;
only saying, provisionally, that the aspect of manners through the
nation at large offers no warrant whatever for any prompt “No” to it.
It is not, however, of the nation at large I here speak; the case is of
the extremely small, though important and significant, fraction of the
whole represented by the Washington group—which thus shows us the
Expropriated Half in the very act of itself pondering that issue. Is the
man “up to it,” up to the major heritage, the man who _could_,
originally, so inconceivably, and for a mere mess of pottage if there
ever was one, let it go? “Are we up to it, really, at this time of day,
and what on earth will awfully become of us if the question, once put to
the test, shall have to be decided against us?” I think it not merely
fanciful to say that some dim, distressful interrogative sound of that
sort frequently reached, in the Washington air, the restless
analyst—though not to any quickening of his own fear. With a perfect
consciousness that it was still early to say, that the data are as yet
insufficient and that the missing quantity must absolutely be found
before it can be weighed and valued, he was none the less struck with
the felicity of many symptoms and would fairly have been able to believe
at moments that the character hitherto so effaced has but to show the
confidence of taking itself for granted. That act of itself reveals,
restores, reinstates and completes this character. Is it not, for that
matter, essentially implied in our recognition of the place as the City
of Conversation? The victim of effacement, the outcast at the door, has,
all the while we have been talking of him, _talked himself_ back; and if
anything could add to this happy portent it would be another that had
scarcely less bearing. Nowhere more than in Washington, positively, were
the women to have struck me as naturally and harmoniously in the social
picture—as happily, soothingly, proportionately, and no more than
proportionately, participant and ministrant. Hence the irresistible
conclusion that with the way really shown them they would only ask to
take it; the way being their assent to the truth that the abdication of
the Man proves ever (after the first flush of their triumph) as bad
really for their function as for his. Hence, in fine, the appearance
that, with the proportions re-established, they will come to recognize
their past world as a fools’ paradise, and their present, and still more
their future, as much more made to endure. They could not, one reasoned,
have been, in general, so perfectly agreeable unless they had been
pleased, and they could not have been pleased without the prospect of
gaining, by the readjusted relation, more, on the whole, than they were
to lose; without the prospect even again perhaps of truly and
insidiously gaining more than the other beneficiary. That _would_ be, I
think, the feminine conception of a readministered justice. Washington,
at such a rate, in any case, might become to them as good as “Europe,”
and a Europe of their own would obviously be better than a Europe of
other people’s. There are, after all, other women on the other
continents.