Part 2 (1/2)
The way in which an expression such as ”Ladies' Cabin” is understood in the United States has always seemed to me very typical of the position of the gentler s.e.x in that country. In England, when we see an inscription of that kind, we a.s.sume that the enclosure referred to is for ladies _only_. In America, unless the ”only” is emphasized, the ”Ladies' Drawing Room” or the ”Ladies' Waiting Room” extends its hospitality to all those of the male s.e.x who are ready to behave as gentlemen and temporarily forego the delights of tobacco. Thus half of the male pa.s.sengers of the United States journey, as it were, under the aegis of woman, and think it no shame to be enclosed in a box labelled with her name.
Put roughly, what chiefly strikes the stranger in the American woman is her candour, her frankness, her hail-fellow-well-met-edness, her apparent absence of consciousness of self or of s.e.x, her spontaneity, her vivacity, her fearlessness. If the observer himself is not of a specially refined or delicate type, he is apt at first to misunderstand the cameraderie of an American girl, to see in it suggestions of a possible coa.r.s.eness of fibre. If a vain man, he may take it as a tribute to his personal charms, or at least to the superior claims of a representative of old-world civilisation. But even to the obtuse stranger of this character it will ultimately become obvious--as to the more refined observer _ab initio_--that he can no more (if as much) dare to take a liberty with the American girl than with his own countrywoman. The plum may appear to be more easily handled, but its bloom will be found to be as intact and as ethereal as in the jealously guarded hothouse fruit of Europe. He will find that her frank and charming companionability is as far removed from masculinity as from coa.r.s.eness; that the points in which she differs from the European lady do not bring her nearer either to a man on the one hand, or to a common woman on the other. He will find that he has to readjust his standards, to see that divergence from the best type of woman hitherto known to him does not necessarily mean deterioration; if he is of an open and susceptible mind, he may even come to the conclusion that he prefers the transatlantic type!
Unless his lines in England have lain in _very_ pleasant places, the intelligent Englishman in enjoying his first experience of transatlantic society will a.s.suredly be struck by the sprightliness, the variety, the fearless individuality of the American girl, by her power of repartee, by the quaint appositeness of her expressions, by the variety of her interests, by the absence of undue deference to his masculine dignity. If in his newly landed innocence he ventures to compliment the girl he talks with on the purity of her English, and a.s.sumes that she differs in that respect from her companions, she will patriotically repel the suggested accusation of her countrywomen by a.s.suring him, without the ghost of a smile, ”that she has had special advantages, inasmuch as an English missionary had been stationed near her tribe.” If she prefers Martin Tupper to Shakespeare, or Strauss to Beethoven, she will say so without a tremor. Why should she hypocritically subordinate her personal instincts to a general theory of taste? Her independence is visible in her very dress; she wears what she thinks suits her (and her taste is seldom at fault), not merely what happens to be the fas.h.i.+onable freak of the moment. What Englishman does not shudder when he remembers how each of his womankind--the comely and the homely, the short and the long, the stout and the lean--at once a.s.sumed the latest form of hat, apparently utterly oblivious to the question of whether it suited her special style of beauty or not? Now, an American girl is not built that way.
She wishes to be in the fas.h.i.+on just as much as she can; but if a special item of fas.h.i.+on does not set her off to advantage, she gracefully and courageously resigns it to those who can wear it with profit. But honour where honour is due! The English girl generally shows more sense of fitness in the dress for walking and travelling; she, consciously or unconsciously, realises that adaptability for its practical purpose is essential in such a case.
The American girl, as above said, strikes one as individual, as varied. In England when we meet a girl in a ball-room we can generally--not always--”place” her after a few minutes' talk; she belongs to a set of which you remember to have already met a volume or two. In some continental countries the patterns in common use seem reduced to three or four. In the United States every new girl is a new sensation. Society consists of a series of surprises. Expectation is continually piqued. A and B and C do not help you to induce D; when you reach Z you _may_ imagine you find a slight trace of reincarnation.
Not that the surprises are invariably pleasant. The very force and self-confidence of the American girl doubly and trebly underline the undesirable. Vulgarity that would be stolid and stodgy in Middles.e.x becomes blatant and aggressive in New York.
The American girl is not hampered by the feeling of cla.s.s distinction, which has for her neither religious nor historical sanction. The English girl is first the squire's daughter, second a good churchwoman, third an English subject, and fourthly a woman. Even the best of them cannot rise wholly superior to the all-pervading, and, in its essence, vulgarising, superst.i.tion that some of her fellow-creatures are not fit to come between the wind and her n.o.bility. Those who reject the theory do so by a self-conscious effort which in itself is crude and a strain. The American girl is, however, born into an atmosphere of unconsciousness of all this, and, unless she belongs to a very narrow coterie, does not reach this point of view either as believer or antagonist. This endues her, at her best, with a sweet and subtle fragrance of humanity that is, perhaps, unique. Free from any sense of inherited or conventional superiority or inferiority, as devoid of the brutality of condescension as of the meanness of toadyism, she combines in a strangely attractive way the charm of eternal womanliness with the latest aroma of a progressive century. It is, doubtless, this quality that M. Bourget has in view when he speaks of the incomparable delicacy of the American girl, or M. Paul Blouet when he a.s.serts that ”you find in the American woman a quality which, I fear, is beginning to disappear in Paris and is almost unknown in London--a kind of spiritualised politeness, a tender solicitude for other people, combined with strong individuality.”
There is one type of girl, with whom even the most modest and most moderately eligible of bachelors must be familiar in England, who is seldom in evidence in the United States--she whom the American aborigines might call the ”Girl-Anxious-to-be-Married.” What right-minded man in any circle of British society has not shuddered at the open pursuit of young Croesus? Have not our novelists and satirists reaped the most ample harvest from the pitiable spectacle and all its results? A large part of the advantage that American society has over English rests in the comparative absence of this phenomenon. Man there does not and cannot bear himself as the cynosure of the female eye; the art of throwing the handkerchief has not been included in his early curriculum. The American dancing man does not dare to arrive just in time for supper or to lounge in the doorway while dozens of girls line the walls in faded expectation of a waltz.
The English girl herself can hardly be blamed for this state of things. She has been brought up to think that marriage is the be-all and end-all of her existence. ”For my part,” writes the author of ”Cecil, the c.o.xcomb,” ”I never blame them when I see them capering and showing off their little monkey-tricks, for conquest. The fault is none of theirs. It is part of an erroneous system.” Lady Jeune expresses the orthodox English position when she a.s.serts flatly that ”to deny that marriage is the object of woman's existence is absurd.”
The anachronistic survival of the laws of primogeniture and entail practically makes the marriage of the daughter the only alternative for a descent to a lower sphere of society. In the United States the proportion of girls who strike one as obvious candidates for marriage is remarkably small. This _may_ be owing to the art with which the American woman conceals her lures, but all the evidence points to its being in the main an entirely natural and unconscious att.i.tude. The American girl has all along been so accustomed to a.s.sociate on equal terms with the other s.e.x that she naturally and inevitably regards him more in the light of a comrade than of a possible husband. She has so many resources, and is so independent, that marriage does not bound her horizon.
Her position, however, is not one of antagonism to marriage. If it were, I should be the last to commend it. It rather rests on an a.s.surance of equality, on the a.s.sumption that marriage is an honourable estate--a rounding and completing of existence--for man as much as for woman. Nor does it mean, I think, any lack of pa.s.sion and the deepest instincts of womanhood. All these are present and can be wakened by the right man at the right time. Indeed, the very fact that marriage (with or without love) is not incessantly in the foreground of an American girl's consciousness probably makes the awakening all the more deep and tender because comparatively unantic.i.p.ated and unforeseen.
The marriages between American heiresses and European peers do not militate seriously against the above view of American marriage. It cannot be sufficiently emphasised that the doings of a few wealthy people in New York are not characteristic of American civilisation.
The New York _Times_ was entirely right when it said, in commenting upon the frank statement of the bridegroom in a recent alliance of this kind that it had been _arranged_ by friends of both parties: ”A few years ago this frankness would have cost him his bride, if his 'friends' had chosen an American girl for that distinction, and even now it would be resented to the point of a rupture of the engagement by most American girls.”
The American girl may not be in reality better educated than her British sister, nor a more profound thinker; but her mind is indisputably more agile and elastic. In fact, a slow-going Britisher has to go through a regular course of training before he can follow the rapid transitions of her train of a.s.sociations. She has the happiest faculty in getting at another's point of view and in putting herself in his place. Her imagination is more likely to be over-active than too sluggish. One of the most popular cla.s.ses of the ”Society for the Encouragement of Study at Home” is that devoted to imaginary travels in Europe. She is wonderfully adaptable, and makes herself at ease in an entirely strange _milieu_ almost before the transition is complete. Both M. Blouet and M. Bourget notice this, and claim that it is a quality she shares with the Frenchwoman. The wife of a recent President is a stock ill.u.s.tration of it--a girl who was transferred in a moment from what we should call a quiet ”middle-cla.s.s” existence to the apex of publicity, and comported herself in the most trying situations with the ease, dignity, unconsciousness, taste, and graciousness of a born princess.
The innocence of the American girl is neither an affectation, nor a prejudiced fable, nor a piece of stupidity. The German woman, quoted by Mr. Bryce, found her American compeer _furchtbar frei_, but she had at once to add _und furchtbar fromm_. ”The innocence of the American girl pa.s.ses abysses of obscenity without stain or knowledge.” She may be perfectly able to hold her own under any circ.u.mstances, but she has little of that detestable quality which we call ”knowing.” The immortal Daisy Miller is a charming ill.u.s.tration of this. I used sometimes to get into trouble with American ladies, who ”hoped I did not take Daisy Miller as a type of the average American girl,” by a.s.suring them that ”I did not--that I thought her much too good for that.” And in truth there seemed to me a lack of subtlety in the current appreciation of the charming young lady from Schenectady, who is much _finer_ than many readers give her credit for. And on this point I think I may cite Mr. Henry James himself as a witness on my side, since, in a dramatic version of the tale published in the _Atlantic Monthly_ (Vol. 51, 1883), he makes his immaculate Bostonian, Mr. Winterbourne, marry Daisy with a full consciousness of all she was and had been. As I understand her, Miss Daisy Miller, in spite of her somewhat unpropitious early surroundings, was a young woman entirely able to appreciate the very best when she met it. She at once recognised the superiority of Winterbourne to the men she had hitherto known, and she also recognised that her ”style” was not the ”style” of him or of his a.s.sociates. But she was very young, and had all the unreasonable pride of extreme youth; and so she determined not to alter her behaviour one jot or t.i.ttle in order to attract him--nay, with a sort of bravado, she exaggerated those very traits which she knew he disliked. Yet all the time she had the highest appreciation of his most delicate refinements, while she felt also that he ought to see that at bottom she was just as refined as he, though her outward mask was not so elegant. I have no doubt whatever that, as Mrs.
Winterbourne, she adapted herself to her new _milieu_ with absolute success, and yet without loss of her own most fascinating individuality.[8]
The whole atmosphere of the country tends to preserve the spirit of unsuspecting innocence in the American maiden. The function of a chaperon is very differently interpreted in the United States and in England. On one occasion I met in a Pullman car a young lady travelling in charge of her governess. A chance conversation elicited the fact that she was the daughter of a well-known New York banker; and the fact that we had some mutual acquaintances was accepted as all-sufficing credentials for my respectability. We had happened to fix on the same hotel at our destination; and in the evening, after dinner, I met in the corridor the staid and severe-looking _gouvernante_, who saluted me with ”Oh, Mr. Muirhead, I have such a headache! Would you mind going out with my little girl while she makes some purchases?” I was a little taken aback at first; but a moment's reflection convinced me that I had just experienced a most striking tribute to the honour of the American man and the social atmosphere of the United States.
The psychological method of suggestive criticism has, perhaps, never been applied with more delicacy of intelligence than in M. Bourget's chapter on the American woman. Each stroke of the pen, or rather each turn of the scalpel, amazes us by its keen penetration. As we at last close the book and meditate on what we have read, it is little by little borne in upon us that though due tribute is paid to the charming traits of the American woman, yet the general outcome of M.
Bourget's a.n.a.lysis is truly d.a.m.natory. If this sprightly, fascinating, somewhat hard and calculating young woman be a true picture of the transatlantic maiden, we may sigh indeed for her lack of the _Ewig Weibliche_. I do not pretend to say where M. Bourget's appreciation is at fault, but that it is false--unaccountably false--in the general impression it leaves, I have no manner of doubt. Perhaps his attention has been fixed too exclusively on the Newport girl, who, it must again be insisted on, is too much impregnated with cosmopolitan _fin de siecle-ism_ to be taken as the American type. Botanise a flower, use the strongest gla.s.ses you will, tear apart and name and a.n.a.lyse,--the result is a catalogue, the flower with its beauty and perfume is not there. So M. Bourget has catalogued the separate qualities of the American woman; as a whole she has eluded his a.n.a.lysis. Perhaps this chapter of his may be taken as an eminent ill.u.s.tration of the limitations of the critical method, which is at times so illuminating, while at times it so utterly fails to touch the heart of things, or, better, the wholeness of things.
Among the most searching tests of the state of civilisation reached by any country are the character of its roads, its minimising of noise, and the position of its women. If the United States does not stand very high on the application of the first two tests, its name a.s.suredly leads all the rest in the third. In no other country is the legal status of women so high or so well secured, or their right to follow an independent career so fully recognised by society at large.
In no other country is so much done to provide for their convenience and comfort. All the professions are open to them, and the opportunity has widely been made use of. Teaching, lecturing, journalism, preaching, and the practice of medicine have long been recognised as within woman's sphere, and she is by no means unknown at the bar.
There are eighty qualified lady doctors in Boston alone, and twenty-five lady lawyers in Chicago. A business card before me as I write reads, ”Mesdames Foster & Steuart, Members of the Cotton Exchange and Board of Trade, Real Estate and Stock Brokers, 143 Main Street, Houston, Texas.” The American woman, however, is often found in still more unexpected occupations. There are numbers of women dentists, barbers, and livery-stable keepers. Miss Emily Faithful saw a railway pointswoman in Georgia; and one of the regular steamers on Lake Champlain, when I was there, was successfully steered by a pilot in petticoats. There is one profession that is closed to women in the United States--that of barmaid. That professional a.s.sociation of woman with man when he is apt to be in his most animal moods is firmly tabooed in America--all honour to it!
The career of a lady whose acquaintance I made in New York, and whom I shall call Miss Undereast, ill.u.s.trates the possibilities open to the American girl. Born in Iowa, Miss Undereast lost her mother when she was three years old, and spent her early childhood in company with her father, who was a travelling geologist and mining prospector. She could ride almost before she could walk, and soon became an expert shot. Once, when only ten years of age, she shot down an Indian who was in the act of killing a white woman with his tomahawk; and on another occasion, when her father's camp was surrounded by hostile Indians, she galloped out upon her pony and brought relief. ”She was so much at home with the shy, wild creatures of the woods that she learned their calls, and they would come to her like so many domestic birds and animals. She would come into camp with wild birds and squirrels on her shoulder. She could la.s.so a steer with the best of them. When, at last, she went to graduate at the State University of Colorado, she paid for her last year's tuition with the proceeds of her own herd of cattle.” After graduating at Colorado State University, she took a full course in a commercial college, and then taught school for some time at Denver. Later she studied and taught music, for which she had a marked gift. The next important step brought her to New York, where she gained in a compet.i.tive examination the position of secretary in the office of the Street Cleaning Department. Her linguistic accomplishments (for she had studied several foreign languages) stood her in good stead, and during the illness of her chief she practically managed the department and ”bossed” fifteen hundred Italian labourers in their own tongue. Miss Undereast carried on her musical studies far enough to be offered a position in an operatic company, while her linguistic studies qualified her for the post of United States Custom House Inspectress.
Latterly she has devoted her time mainly to journalism and literature, producing, _inter alia_, a guidebook to New York, a novel, and a volume of essays on social topics. It is a little difficult to realise when talking with the accomplished and womanly _litterateur_ that she has been in her day a slayer of Indians and ”a mighty huntress before the Lord;” but both the facts and the opportunities underlying them testify in the most striking manner to the largeness of the sphere of action open to the _puella Americana_.
If American women have been well treated by their men-folk, they have n.o.bly discharged their debt. It is trite to refer to the numerous schemes of philanthropy in which American women have played so prominent a part, to allude to the fact that they have as a body used their leisure to cultivate those arts and graces of life which the preoccupation of man has led him too often to neglect. This chapter may well close with the words of Professor Bryce: ”No country seems to owe more to its women than America does, nor to owe to them so much of what is best in its social inst.i.tutions and in the beliefs that govern conduct.”
FOOTNOTES:
[8] Since writing the above I have learned that Mr. W.D. Howells has written of ”Daisy Miller” in a similar vein, speaking of her ”indestructible innocence and her invulnerable new-worldliness.” ”It was so plain that Mr. James disliked her vulgar conditions that the very people to whom he revealed her essential sweetness and light were furious that he should have seemed not to see what existed through him.”
V
The American Child