“Did it ever occur to you,” demanded the Professor, “how few people actually do fashionable things?—that we probably are just as hyperbolical in assuming that young women once amused themselves with embroidery as that they now amuse themselves with golf?”
“Stitches and links,” I pondered, knowing that the Professor did not expect an answer.
“What proportion of folks should you say actually do concentrate their functions in the ‘barbaric swat’?”
I lifted my head; and she went on:
“Yes, I know that there always must be a fashionable, a dominating pastime, and I have no disparagement of golf as golf. It is a good enough game in its way. I am bound to admit this after having made a very good score myself. Moreover,it is Scottish, which is a guarantee of a latent profundity. It is a large game, and, as Sir Walter said of eating tarts, is ‘no inelegant pleasure.’ I have been told by those who have had an opportunity to know, that it calls out a great variety of qualities. That may be said of many other things; but no matter. My suggestion is that the assumption of prevalence in a so-called fashionable thing leaves something unexplained, something that may be very important, a philosophical hiatus—”
“Professor,” I said, “have you never stopped to think that fashionable fads and fads that are not fashionable are potent in two ways, that is to say, first and primarily, in participation, and second, in contemplation? There is less golf than talk about golf. One game of golf may be repeated any day, for example, one hundred million times in print. As the newspapers play golf with type, so the physically present spectators on the links are repeated many-fold in those who not less are participants and spectators, who wear ostentatious golf stockings without ever having seen a teeing ground. This secondary participation and appreciation is the breath of life to social fads. Probably this may be said of all not absolutely primary pleasures. And so society says, ‘We are all playing golf,’ which is not true at all, but which instantly produces a situation that amounts to the same thing. We shall say that one woman in ten thousand who may be in a situation, so far as opportunity is concerned, to play anything, is playing golf, but this shall notmake it possible for the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine who are not playing golf, to play anything else and make it fashionable at the same time. This could not be, any more than that we could have more than one Napoleon, more than one most-talked-of book, more than one absorbing scandal, at a time. All epidemics present this feature of concentration. Napoleon was just as much an epidemic as crinoline or ‘Robert Elsmere.’ The hypnotists have a word for this which has escaped me at the moment—”
“Multo-suggestion,” contributed the Professor, patiently.
“Something to that effect, in which we have a scientific explanation of the exclusiveness of fashion, an explanation of fashion itself. And the thing could not be different. That susceptibility to the contagion of enthusiasm which inspires the American with so passionate an interest in all of his hobbies, is a susceptibility which explains hiskeener interest in life, his democracy of sentiment, his ardent yet generally cautious and sane pursuit of entertainment.”
“Much of this,” interposed the Professor, in her ruthless way, “might, it seems to me, be said with equal propriety of any civilized people.”
“I think, Professor, that there are some significant points of difference—points of difference associated very largely, I think, with the American sense of humor, which we are in the habit of complacently arrogating. I think, Professor, that your philosophical hiatus is occupied very largely by a sense of humor.”
“That,” laughed the Professor, “reminds me of that story of the boy who was seeking to explain to his companion the characteristics of spaghetti. ‘You know maccaroni?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you know the hole through it?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, spaghetti’s the hole.’ I do wish I could believe more completely in your sense of humor theory. In the first place it is hard to explain some of the things the young people do by their possession of a sense of humor.”
“On the contrary, Professor, I think American young folks develop a sense of humor earlier than any other in the world, which is a Yankee enough thing to say. This may be an odd contention from me, but to me one of the most distinctive traits of the American girl is her gift for being unserious. It is not always a sense of humor, either; if it is, it is a sense entirely her own, for itcertainly is not associated with traits which we ascribe to a sense of humor in men. In any case it is a saving sense, a sense that keeps her from taking things so tragically as the unknowing or unsympathetic spectator might expect. The American has a genius for radicalism, a creative defiance of logic and tradition. Once in a while some philosopher discovers that the frivolities of life have an immense importance. Scientifically the physical distortions of a laugh are ridiculous. Yet we almost have ceased to defend it, even in young ladies.”
“A ready laugh,” the Professor said, “is no indication of a sense of humor. The comic and the humorous are sometimes even antagonistic. You have heard me defend irreverence in girls, but a want of seriousness often indicates a want of humor, for a sense of humor, my friend, is essentially a sense of proportion. Now, to my mind, the American girl does not indicate so keen a sense of proportion in her golf, for instance, as in her clubs.”
“Well,” I ventured, “she is serious enough in them, surely.”
“Only to those who do not understand her,” returned the Professor severely. “That women take their clubs too seriously, too improvingly, has been a matter of complaint for a long time. There has been almost a missionary spirit among those who have sought to save our girls from clubs. Some of the missionaries have preached total abstinence among the girls. ‘If you take one club,’they have said, ‘you will take another. The appetite will grow on you. You pride yourself on your power of resistance now; but after you have taken a club, a dreadful, unappeasable craving will spring up within you, and you will want more. You will not be able to pass a club without wanting it. Even after you have yielded to a morning, afternoon, and evening indulgence, you will find a temptation to take a luncheon club too,—and when you take them with your meals they have a particularly insidious effect. From this it is but a step to a Browning bracer at nine A. M. and a Schopenhauer cocktail just before dinner. Take no clubs at all—especially the subtle, supposed-to-be-innocuous reading club—’”
“Look not upon the club when it is read,” I murmured.
“‘—for these,’” the Professor continued, with her inimitable chuckle, “‘for these lead surely to more deadly stimulants. Indeed, these are, to those who truly know them, more deadly than many another sort.’ Then there is the more moderate school of missionaries which is for limiting the number of clubs to so many a week, or to cutting them down gradually on the theory that a girl who has been taking clubs right along cannot stop short without peril to her health. By dropping, say, one club a week for a whole season, a girl may, from a repulsive intellectual sot be brought back, by patient nursing, and in due time, to decency and three clubs a week.”
“But, Professor,” I said, “they must believe in clubs as a medicine, as a stimulant in the case of a threatening mental chill—”
“Don’t be frivolous,” commanded the Professor; “my irony was incidental to the statement that all of this talk about the seriousness of women’s clubs is based on a misapprehension. In outward form the clubs are serious, and the theme, their ostensibleraison d’être, almost justifies the misapprehension. When you see a batch of women setting in upon civil government, or mediæval pottery, or Sanskrit, or Homer’s hymn to the Dioscuri, or the Heftkhan of Isfendiyar, it is, perhaps, instinctive that the uninformed should jump to the conclusion that these women are serious, though a moment’s thought might suggest a wiser view. If women really took these things seriously they would not survive. The truth is that the French Revolution, and the Rig-Veda, and the Ramayana are all very amusing if you know how to go at them. If the physical culture classes took the exercises as seriously as the teachers I am sure the members would all break down. And it isthe same way with the study of cathedrals or street-cleaning.”
I reminded the Professor of the lady I had heard of, who wanted to know at the club whether the Parliamentary drill then organizing was anything like the Delsarte movements, and of the other, who, at her first meeting, being appointed a teller, wanted to know what she was to tell. “I trust, Professor, that you will not take from me my simple, unquestioning faith in the earnestness of these light-seeking ladies.”
“Those instances,” smiled the Professor, “illustrate the first phase. You must not be misled by them, for they actually are confirmatory. You may discern in them the attitude of mind favorable to the feminine way of taking things lightly. A woman who asks why, never gets nervous prostration. It is when she gets above asking why that you may watch for shipwreck.”
“Well, Professor, all I can say is that you have left me in a state of miserable darkness as to women’s clubs. Surely there are vast misapprehensions somewhere.”
“There surely are,” admitted the Professor.
“But how do you explain them?”
“The women?”
“The clubs.”
“By woman’s revolt against her segregation. Not, in my opinion, that she is protesting against the gregarious advantages of man, but because she is beginning to discover that her sisters are worthknowing. She has begun to be impersonally interested in, as well as interesting to, the other woman. The woman’s desire is not improvement; it is, whether she knows it or not, the other woman, precisely as a man’s interest in his club is the other man. It has been said that a man often goes to his club to be alone, and that there is this advantage in a club that is a place, over a club that is a state of mind. But a woman goes to a clubnotto be alone. I suppose there are times when it would do a woman good to get away from her family, not into company, but into lonesome quiet. Mrs. Moody, who has said so many wise things, declares in her ‘Unquiet Sex’ that college girls are too little alone for the health of their nerves. This may be so, yet women’s clubs are contemporaneous with girls’ colleges. It begins to look as if it was at college that the American girl learned that it is not good for woman to be alone—even with her family. At any rate, that independence which is so characteristic of the American girl, which is, as I have been informed and believe, somewhat disconcerting to men, is, undoubtedly, largely the result of the American girl’s improved relations with her sister women. When she is as successfully gregarious with regard to women as men are with regard to men, her sex maturity will be complete. I know that you are wondering what sort of a woman she is going to be in that matured state. Have no anxiety. She will not be less agreeable, but more so. She will overdo the clubs, but she will recoverfrom that; she will shed them the moment they cease to serve her purpose. I am going to a club now. I am going to talk to it about Savonarola. The club will be very well dressed, and so shall I, if I know myself, and we neither of us shall let smoke from the fateful fires of the fifteenth century blind us to the fact that we are living in the nineteenth.”
“All of which,” I said, in a severe tone, “is illustrative of the fact that woman is a sophist—though perhaps I should say an artist, for she uses life as so much material with which to construct an effect.”
“Lifeisan art,” remarked the Professor at the mirror.
“And you, Professor—”
But she was gone. I understood well enough that the Professor had just given an exhibition of her dexterity in taking the other side, taking it in a feminine rather than in a pugnacious spirit. The Professor’s negatives always remind me of howaffirmative the American girl is. There is an English painting called “Summer,” in which the artist (Mr. Stephens) gracefully symbolizes the drowsy indolence of June. This classic allegory may not have the English girl specifically in mind, but I am quite certain that we should not be satisfied with an American symbol for the same idea which did not in some way indicate that Miss America, even in summer, is likely to be representing some enthusiasm, Pickwickian or not as you may choose to make it out. The spirit of fantasy, sitting in the midst of our variegated life, who should call up the American Summer Girl, must summon a different company. The spirit of fantasy would know that the American summer girl, though she can be a sophist, and agree that this or that is the fashion this summer, is nevertheless not to be painted as a reiteration. It frequently was remarked of the Americans at Santiago that they had great individualforce as fighters. There always will be critics to remark upon the hazard of this trait in war. At all events it was and is an American trait. And in conducting her summer campaign against an elusive if not altogether a smokeless enemy, Miss America is displaying the same trait. She can accept a social sophistry, but you must leave her individuality. She will not have tennis wholly put aside if she does not choose. She will not give up her horse because a little steed of steel has entered the lists, nor give up her bicycle because it has become profanely popular. She may choose to arm herself solely with a parasol, to detach herself from even the suggestion of a hobby, which, to one who has the individual skill, is a notoriously potent way in which to establish one of those absolute despotisms so familiar and so fatal in society. There is the girl with a butterfly net, the girl who goes a-fishing, the girl who swims, the girl who wears bathing suits, the girl who gives a sparkle to the Chautauqua meetings in the summer, the girl who gets up camping parties, the girl who gets up the dances, the girl who plots theatricals, the girl with the camera, the girl who can shoot like a cowboy,—where should we end that remarkable list? How impossible to express the summer girl in any single type?
Indeed, the American girl’s methods of amusing herself are so various as to make it increasingly difficult to typify her at all, except as a goddess who, like Minerva (thoughshedid not go in muchfor amusing herself), shall illustrate a wide range of activities serenely and successfully undertaken. There is a triteness in the accomplishments of any period, yet the spirit of individualism in the American girl introduces here, as elsewhere, a diversifying element. I was reading the other day that Miss Mitford had that “faculty for reciting verses which is among the most graceful of accomplishments.” Where have all the verse reciters gone? Why did this elegant accomplishment perish? Are we all less poetical? Are our girls losing that sense of sentiment to which we used to look for so many of their quieter charms? Has this change anything to do with another change, surely not to be lightly accepted, which has of late years taken poetry from the top of the page, where we once thought it belonged of natural right, and placed it at the bottom? Is it finally to be crowded off the page altogether? Has the fact that women no longer consider verse an accomplishment anything to do with this subtle but revolutionary change? And what shall poetry say? Will poetry go on as it has from the beginning of time arming us with epithets of praise?
If she be not so to me,What care I how fair she be?
If she be not so to me,What care I how fair she be?
If she be not so to me,What care I how fair she be?
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?
I must ask the Professor some day what she thinks of the disappearance of poetry—she would tell me to say verse—as an accomplishment. For of course we cannot afford to ignore the significance of accomplishments, their influence either uponthose who display or upon those who observe them. Accomplishments are more than an armor, a decoration,—they are a vent. A boy has his fling; a girl must have her accomplishments. It is long since hobbies were fitted with a side-saddle, and we have had no occasion to resent the general results. The concrete effect upon individual men is sometimes disquieting, but that is another matter. Miss America is, after all, especially accomplished in what she knows. The product of a system by which the limits of her information are the limits of her curiosity,—for, in general, she is not prohibited from reading the newspapers,—she has acquired a faculty which may, for aught I know, have superseded her quotation of verse,—the faculty for quoting facts. Yes, she still quotes, and the newer accomplishment, if less elegant, is not one which we may scorn or overlook. If in Tennyson’s phrase, she is part of all that she has seen, we might add “in print,” as a supplemental explanation of her attitude of mind.
Perhaps if the author of “Les Misérables” saw her at certain times he might use the qualified praise he applied to the Parisians when he called them “frivolous but intelligent.” Yet if St. Jerome had seen her on the beach I hardly think he could have had the heart to say, “I entirely forbid a young lady to bathe.” Her whole effect is qualifying. She carries into all her enthusiasms a modifying reservation. The trait is typified and illustrated for us when wesee her coming home from the reading club on a wheel, or carrying her novel to breakfast. The social hysteric always is sure that something dreadful is going to happen, and then, in one of those sensational hairbreadth escapes in which nature delights, the thing does not happen. The hysteric has overlooked the reservation by which the fad escapes monomania, by which the enthusiasm is subordinated to its owner.
Intermittently her enthusiasms bring up the venerable charge of mannishness. A hundred years ago the editor of the London “Times” complained savagely that women were becoming wickedly masculine. “Their hunting, shooting, driving, cricketing, fencing, faroing and skating,” he cried,“present a monstrous chaos of absurdity not only making day and night hideous but the sex itself equivocal. Lady-men or men-ladies, ‘you’ll say it’s Persian, but let it be changed.’” Ptahhotpou the ancient Egyptian has something to the same effect, but I have forgotten his phrase.