A distinguished general and admirable gentleman once was said to have lost the Presidency because he called the tariff a “local issue.” It might be difficult for us to discipline Coleridge for calling love a “local anguish.” Yet the plausibility of the statement should not defend the culprit. Love is, actually, not at all local, particularly when it is an anguish. It is immensely pervasive, an international issue, an inter-planetary, a universal issue. The light of love may be hidden under the bushel of modesty, yet its undaunted X-rays will penetrate the farthermost spaces.
But it is too late, or too early, in other words wholly unfashionable, to write about love, and I certainly should not have committed the offence of the foregoing paragraph had it not been for an entirely orderly and even timely thought as to the possibility that love, like any other malady or manifestation, might have a purely national flavor, not merely in its outward symptoms, but in itsinherent quality. That is to say, I had wondered in what way, if in any way, the American girl’s definition of love would be distinctive. If I had asked the Professor, she would, had she consented to take me seriously, have described love as “the sum and sublimation of all possible inter-human attachments,” or something of that sort. She would have been abstract, for woman, however personal she may incline to be by virtue of her sex and method, loves the abstract in definition for so much of reservation as it may leave to her. There is safety and breathing room in a large definition. Doubtless we never shall be able to get at Miss America’s sentiments except in a purely empirical way, and if I were writing a treatise instead of setting down a few notes, I should have felt an obligation to study out the question by observing critically the conduct of the American girl in the processes of courtship.
The difficulty of such observation always must lie in the fact that the most interested man in any specific instance himself is wholly incapable of making report if he would. A man who could be analytical in any circumstances which included a settlement of his own fate, would be fit for every treason. He might go through a variety of mental motions which to him, at the time, passed for the convolutions of pure reason. He might, and doubtless often has, fancied himself as studying her, as penetrating the mask of her femininity, as dispassionately dissecting her sentiments. Indeed, everyprudent man must at some stage weigh, with whatever sobriety may be possible to him, the chances of what she will say; and this must always include some estimate of what she is thinking.
The relationship between what she is thinking and what she will say is one of the most complex in nature, and I fancy that in our climate and environment its fundamental complexity has been increased. I know that it is the habit of science to assume that the reason woman seems more contradictory than man is not that she is dishonest, but that she is impulsive. Impulse naturally is far less uniform than reason. “They change their opinions,” complains Heine, “as often as they change their dress,” a sentiment which proves conclusively that Heine had credulous intervals. A woman who always had the same opinion would instinctively realize the stupidity of that condition, as she would the condition of always being seen in the same dress; and if she didn’t have a new opinion she might do with the old opinion as with the old dress, turn or cut it over. You cannot say from the notorious inaccuracy of a woman’s gesture when she presumes to place her hand on her heart, that she has not a heart, that she is unaware of its precise location, or that it is not in the right place.
If a man means less than he says, and a woman always means more, we may see at a glance that it is easier to subtract than to add. But this is not the chief difficulty. A man, if I may be pardoned the dogmatism, always speaks in the original, whilewoman must be translated, and it is vastly easier in any case, to translate his hyperbole than her meiosis. When woman was simpler, she had less of this quality. When she said no, and simply meant yes, man learned to translate and understand her. Even a man could work out by the least subtle of reasoning that when she said “No!” most fiercely she really was saying, “Idiot!why don’t youmakeme say yes!” But after a time, perhaps because she suspected, for good reason, man’s discovery of the cypher, because she saw that it was not enough to turn the alphabet upside down, woman began to qualify rather than to invert, and man was no longer in possession of the key. The whole arithmetic of the calculation was infinitely lifted, and rose from the rule of three into the higher realms of pure mathematics. If shealwayscalled him back he would know just what to do. If a little absencealwaysmade her heart grow fonder, the process was capable of exact and circumstantial procedure. But no longer is it so. She may, indeed, still mean yes when she says no. She reserves her constitutional rights. But to read her language now, to filch from her swift talk the true meaning, to trace in the deceptively deep stream of her feminine philosophy the faintly shining pebbles of pure fact, is a function calling out the highest that is in man.
In Miss America, then, we have this quality at its best, or its worst, as you may view the matter; and the quality in her is coupled with others that belong to her, and perhaps to her only. The degree ofindependence which she has achieved has had a natural effect upon her relations to courtship. This independence has not merely accentuated the elusiveness which belongs to her as a woman. The quality of being hard to get is not new in woman, or in any degree original in any race. Ranging from the conditions in which barbaric woman is knocked down by the strongest bidder, to those in which she is knocked down to the highest, there is a uniform, because instinctive, outward habit of indifference or aloofness in the sex. But Miss America’s independence affects the whole question of her choice and the method of her choice. And, committed as she is, by virtue of being a woman, to a vast and fateful chance, she has, more certainly than any other woman in the world, a choice. For good or ill, and in whatever degree social station and social habit may modify the practice, she has an actual participation in the forming of the matrimonial partnership. The world has seen marriage by capture, by service, by purchase, by social convenience, by free and natural choice. The experiment of marriage by free choice has received in our own country its fullest trial. Marriage by social convenience and by purchase still survive, even with us, and there are many among us who think that marriage for love may not be final as a national trait, and that we will discover that the compact of marriage, being in the interest of society and actually under the government of society should be made directly in conformity with the convenience of society.Meanwhile, the trait is under scrutiny, the practice is under trial.
Marriage for love, is marriage in which woman is the arbiter, so that Miss America is carrying out, side by side with her brother’s experiment in democracy, an extraordinary and unprecedented experiment in social practice. She believes, and reasonably, that Plato prophesied this system in his conservatively worded remark that “people must be acquainted with those into whose families and with whom they marry and are given in marriage.” She believes that if marriage is to be “chiefly by accident and the grace of nature,” it shall be left to her to illustrate the grace of nature. And most men who are candid with themselves know that while man may have the nominal initiative, she is in charge of the situation. There is a German saying that a man cannot be too careful in choosing his parents. It is equally true that a man cannotbe too careful in letting the right woman pick him out.
If I have been able to grasp it, the American girl’s idea is that marriage is best when it is a culminated friendship, that is to say, when it includes friendship. This is a new idea, of course, revolutionary in more than may at first appear. Indeed, we might more correctly call the American idea, marriage for friendship. Balzac has said a verysevere thing of love that does not include “an indissoluble friendship”; but it cannot be denied that we often are perplexed to see that in this business the greater does not always seem to be including the less. If the American girl shall succeed in definitely incorporating friendship into the essentials of marriage she will have accomplished a great triumph. “As to the value of other things,” says Cicero, “most men differ; concerning friendship all have the same opinion.”
If she shall succeed in making friendship an essential of marriage, Miss America will, indisputably, have founded the American practice of a pre-matrimonial acquaintance. We shall go on believing that when we meet her with a “Fate-can-not-harm-me-I-am-engaged” look, she cannot, as often happens in other civilizations, be in ignorance of his name. And we can see at a glance that by insisting that she shallknowthe man she is to marry, Miss America is assuming an intimate and personal dominion over courtship. She not only is assuming a power and a responsibility, but confessing the delicate truth of her individual jurisdiction. It will make no difference what formula she uses for “You may speak to father.” The euphemisms behind which she now can hide herself are as diaphanous as her finest veil.
Yet, is there any to doubt her mastery of the situation she has invented? Is there any to doubt that in her new situation she has a new power? I know what has been said of the women who havegone before. “And this I set down as an absolute truth,” said Thackeray, “that a woman with fair opportunities and without an absolute hump may marrywhom she likes.” And I do not mean, and perhaps should specifically protest that I do not mean, that Miss America is a whit more assertive in her selection than the women of whom Thackeray has chosen to say this much. But there is a sense in which Miss America, by virtue not only of peculiar privileges, but of peculiar endowments, is giving a new significance to courtship. Her attitude of mind is not to be confused with mere independence. We have many antecedent examples of independence. “At all events,” wrote Mrs. Carlyle to her insistent suitor, “I will marry no one else. That is all the promise I can and will make.” She thought that an agreement to marry a certain person at a certain time was simply absurd. Miss America’s independence is the product of conditions which have produced a sex attitude of mind as well as an individual attitude of mind.
It has seemed as if the development of this sentiment, and the realization of responsibility, were making the American girl more conservative in certain ways, and that she was, in the matter of early marriages for example, drawing nearer to the older systems. Sentimentally, early marriages are a good thing. Perhaps they are practically also. Martin Luther and other wise commentators have pointedly advised them. But the century has scarcely offered approval. Stubbs, in his “Anatomyof Abuses,” complained bitterly that it should be possible for “every sawcy boy of xiiij., xvi., or xx yeres of age to catch a woman and marie her without any fear of God at all.” Early marriages were a source of great complaint in our colonial days. Probably the caution of our young women is responsible for the fact, now frequently quoted, that early marriages are less frequent. At the first sign of a new caution there is always the alarmist who jumps to the conclusion that he is to be put off until the time De Quincey set for the amusement of taking home a printing press,—“the twilight of his dotage”; and it will be said of this or that section when some one is in the mood to say it, as Heine said of France in 1837, that “girls do not fall in love in this country.”
Some characteristics of the era may not be attributed to anything that is new in our system. Flirtation, for example, is a very old vice. Yet, as everycalling has a conscience of its own, I like to think that flirtation has been harshly painted in some respects. If it does not show specific modifications in our longitudes, we must conclude that it is a necessary evil. At any rate we know from more than one biologist that flirting is not solely a human trait. This in a measure disperses and softens the responsibility. And one must not be hasty in marking flirtation. There is the seeming and the real, like true and false croup. Many women have been accused of flirting who were never more serious in their lives, just as we have known them to be cruelly accused of sincerity at a time when their whimsicality should have been patent to the least intelligent of observers.
In an era when letter-writing is said to be dying out, it is not surprising that love-letters should come under suspicion. Indeed, there have been many temptations to cynicism. The law courts have been invoked to decide whether love-letters belong to the sender or to the receiver; nice questions have grown out of misunderstandings as to proposals of marriage. It is hinted that men are to become revoltingly crafty as to things put upon paper, and that the young lady of a not remote future will receive her lover’s notes moist and blurred from the embrace of a copying book.
The general decrease in the quantity of letter-writing due, among other reasons, to the telephone, the trolley and railroads, and the increased rapidity of life in general, undoubtedly has influenced themere bulk of sentimental correspondence, though concrete instances are conflicting. One young man of my acquaintance writes to his sweetheart every day. Another, who has been engaged for some months, confessed to writing to the young woman (she lives in another city) once a week; “and do you know,” he said, “I have a deuce of a time to find anything to say!”
Whatever tendency the American girl herself may be willing to foster or accept, it always will be true that the gift for writing the right letter to the right person is one of the most potent known to civilization. There are genuine, warm-hearted charming-mannered men who can write only a brutally dull letter, and there are reprobates who can fill a letter with the aroma of paradise. In an affair beginning with letters the reprobate must have the advantage. Indeed, I knew a girl who went on believing in the author of certain letters after the most disenchanting honeymoon that ever woman endured, after society had looked askance at her, after the towering lie of those letters had cast a blighting shadow across her life.
Thoughts
Thoughts
One pretty and pleasant little woman in Kentucky told me that when she was engaged she sometimes got two letters a day. “And when we were married I missed those letters so!” And this was indubitably a happy marriage. I knew in just what sort of place those letters would be kept, and just how they would be tied up, and could fancy just how she would look in the dim of a rainyday when she brought them forth and spread them out—by the cradle.
Who can tell what passes in the heart of a woman? Who can read her as she reads her letters over there in the corner of the summer hotel verandah? Who can say what she is thinking there in the shadow of the birch-tree picking off the petals? “He loves me—he loves me not”—no, surely something more modern. What could be more piquing than that partnership—nature and a woman? If she chooses to take another member into the firm, that is her affair. If she has a tryst, who shall have the meanness to wish any more or less than that he may not keep her waiting an unseemly time—or that she may not have followed a habit she has, and have gone absently to the wrong place? Yet she may have chosen to walk alone and to let the summer pass and the hectic colors of the dying season flaunt themselves in her face without giving a sign. Who can say what passes in the mind of a woman? When she opens the book of her own heart, and turns to the last page first to see how the thing comes out, is she not puzzled sometimes to find all the print running backward? Who can say, if a fairy came out of the wood, what manner of choice she would ask of that fairy, what fortune she would consider sweetest, what form of man she would ask for her Prince Charming? How small the chance that she knows what she wants, or that if she did know she wouldregard it as safe and symmetrical not to ask for the opposite?
In the old romances the dead leaves crackled, and the cavalier of her dreams whispered the soft right word in her ear, and she murmured “Yes!” spelling it with two letters and a capital N as in the present hour. Would the gallant of the past be to her liking to-day? Would she receive him civilly, or would she tease and taunt him in her provoking modern way, abusing the qualities she liked in him, sending him away because she didn’t want him to go, telling him that he should never win her because she had begun to fear that he would?
Neither the brusqueness nor the diffidence of the Puritan lover would be likely to please her. The Puritan lover would lack a great many of the qualities she now admires in men, chief among these, mayhap, the quality of not being too solemn. She is far from Puritan severity herself, and she would, I fear, see him go with a sigh of relief. In the quality of not being too solemn, she might find the beau of Louis XVI.’s time more to her liking, though his eagerness to draw his sword for her would certainly make her laugh. She never would appreciate the romance of his dainty duels.
His pretty speeches would amuse her for a little while, but the man who flatters her nowadays must be a more expert artist to escape the mortal wound of her ridicule. In a later day compliment undoubtedly became more of an art, and the dude of the Directoire, whom you might have found in the quaint drawing-rooms of old Boston, or Philadelphia, or Georgetown, as well as upon his native soil, was an ingratiating gallant in many ways. He posed, because Napoleon was making it the fashion to pose, but he posed well, and he studied the best methods of saying caressing things without making them nauseatingly sweet. This art of compliment, of not saying the right thing to the wrong woman, nor the wrong thing to any woman, reached an interesting point of development in the contemporaries of Beau Brummel. Possibly Miss America would have liked a Beau Brummel in an artistic spirit, and Brummel had, as a spectacle, many traits of gracefulness and fascination. Her elusiveness would have piqued him and his not too grovelling deference would have made her think him an entertaining fellow. His dress was elegant without effeminacy, his hat was the most extraordinary yetdevised by the ingenuity of man—which itself should be a bond of sympathy. But hats pass away, and beaux melt among the hazy images in the tapestry of time.
Yet they are always with us. Every age has blamed its beaux for wanting the true gallantry of beaux in the past. We all have heard Miss America say, rather petulantly, that the days of chivalry are gone. Perhaps they are; perhaps our men give too little attention to the graces of life. But let us hope that the modern man is not always as satire paints him, that for the little shams of chivalry he has substituted some real essence of an even deeper homage.
And we must not forget, in considering courtship, that she, too, though she may not have greatly changed in fact, has produced an effect quite as puzzling as the change in man. One of the German painters, possibly under the influence of Sudermann, has shown the modern girl, assisted, and possibly instigated by Cupid, paring hearts with a knife. But this is an old partnership—Cupid & Co., Limited. I cannot say what sign the firmputs up over the door in Germany. In this country it certainly should read: “Hearts extracted without pain.”
Yes, she is cool. The caterer’s sign “Weddings Furnished,” does not, I fear, ever give her a thrill. She asks no one to furnish a wedding for her. She seldom appears to be in the mental situation described by the thought-curers as one of “intense expectancy.” And she is, it must be frankly admitted, developing a keen, a disconcerting, critical sense, an inevitable result to be sure, yet carrying its own bewildering effects. This is the American spirit, the inquiring spirit, the tendency to insist upon the re-establishment of standards. The American girl always is in the attitude of being willing to admit the superiority of man—if he can prove it. Here enters her Americanism. Her contention is that you cannot transmit relativity. She summons science to show that new criteria are necessary, and she continually is calling man into the lists to defend his titles, to repeat his victories, or surrender the trophies.
If you look at it squarely it simply is iconoclasm, a social form of image-breaking, the image in thiscase being traditional man. Observe, however, that woman does not actually destroy the image. She tentatively takes it down from the pedestal. Who knows but that, having dusted it off, she may, after all, decide to put it back on the pedestal again? Meanwhile, man is under scrutiny. It is a trying moment. It is like an examination in a postgraduate course. The American girl is examining man for a new degree. And man has no choice but to struggle for it. He absolutely is without an alternative. He must face the most exacting social service examination ever imposed by human caution or sociological skepticism. To meet the test will be to wear a proud title.