I
THE AMERICAN TYPE
The tradition that the women of the region in which we live illustrate all of those traits that give an abiding charm to the sex, is one that sometimes may be unreasonable, perhaps even comic; yet it cannot be discreditable. Balzac, who remarks somewhere that nothing unites men so much as a certain conformity of view in the matter of women, may seem unphilosophical when he remarks somewhere else upon the absurdity of English women. His French antipathy has an unreasonably affirmative sting. But we do not care how many Thackerays regard the English girl as the bright particular flower of creation. We like and expect the author of “The Newcomes” to say: “I think it is not national prejudice which makes me believe that a high-bred English lady is the most complete of all Heaven’s subjects in this world.” For the same reason we delight in N. P. Willis’s confidence when he declares that “there is no such beautiful work under the sky as an American girl in her bellehood.” And Mr. Willis adds with the same whimsical consciousness of national partiality: “I think I am not prejudiced.”
Of course this instinctive preference is fundamental. We are prepared to hear from science that the African savage prefers the thick lips and flat nose of the African girl to any other sort; that this is why the African girl has a flat nose and thick lips; that gallantry is a phase of natural selection, and so on. We can understand that there is a merely relative difference of attitude between the savage lover who woos his lady with a club, and the modern suitor who swears to give up all of his clubs for her sake. What perplexes us is our anxiety to explain our modern instinct, and (what is more perplexing) our anxiety to explain her; to ascertain and even to catalogue her essential traits—to discover, if not why we prefer the American girl, at least what manner of girl it is that we thus are instinctively preferring.
What is the American type? Is the typical American girl as the British novelist so often has described her—rich, noisy, wasp-waisted and slangy? Is she a “Daisy Miller” or a “Fair Barbarian”? Is she what Richard Grant White feared she too often was, “a creature composed in equal parts of mind and leather”? Is she Emerson’s “Fourth of July of Zoology,” or is she illustrating the discovery which Irving claimed to have made among certain philosophers “that all animals degenerate in America and man among the number”?
From those foreigners who make a Cook’s tour examination of us, the evidence in favor of the proposition that we grow more pretty and witty women to the acre than any other country in the world, is overwhelming. But there are obvious reasons why we must distrust this foreign comment. Too often it plainly is a propitiatory item, when it is not illustrating a flippant wish among men writers to occupy Disraeli’s position “on the side of the angels.” That traveller has a profound distaste for a country who does not find that it has pretty women.
If anything is more inevitable than this, it is that the traveller will find fault with the type preferred by the men of the country he is visiting. “What is most amazing,” says the observer in Zululand or elsewhere, “is that the prettiest women, the women without this or that hideous deformity, are not admired by the men.” The Kaffir prince on a visit to England, or the Apache chief among the palefaces in the city of the Great Father, invariably are astounded at the obtuseness of the white men. I remember once listening to a group of New York artists who were discussing preferred types of women, and it was agreed, with a hopeless and resentful unanimity, that most New Yorkers preferred fat women, since most of the good clothes and diamonds were worn by fat women. All of which goes to show, perhaps, that natural selection is an exclusive affair.
Probably even patriotism does not demand of us an admiration for the beauty of the very first American girls—the dusky darlings of our primitive tribes. These earliest American girls were not dowered with the fatal gift of beauty as we understand beauty. Indeed, it is quite generally admitted that the American Indian girl is not and never was so pretty as the girls of some of the Pacific islands, for example. Far be it from me to attack any precious traditions concerning the red man, or the red woman, either. Far be it from me to touch with impious hand the romantic panoply of Pocahontas. I am not writing a scientific treatise. I have no point to prove. It is quite possible that there is something distinctive in the personality of the Indian girl, whether she be as poetry has painted her or as she stands in the analysis of science. If I pass her by it is in no spirit of partisanship toward either view. She is an old story, and some day when she is a new story we may have occasion for surprise.
The fact is that I must content myself here with a glance at the American girl of more recent times, though she also will seem to be an old story if we permit ourselves to remember the number of things which have been said. We are not likely to forget the unction with which foreign visitors sketched the daughters of Colonial America. Indeed, we are in a measure dependent upon those sketches for a knowledge of these ancestral daughters. As in all judgments of remote appearances, we here must lean upon mere opinion. There was no camera in the days of Priscilla, nor in the days of Dolly Madison, and painted portraiture, unchallenged by the photograph, had reached heights of admirable gallantry. For purposes of pictorial reconstruction we have an enthusiastic description, the dubious confessions of a diary, a charming little miniature or a mellowing canvas in an old frame, a quaint gown, wrinkled by time; but we have no photograph. I hear the Romanticist mutter, “Thank Heaven for that!” Alas! the photograph is an expert witness, and how he can disagree! Was ever any human specialist on the witness stand so dogmatic, so insinuating, so sophistical as the photograph? Who, without an obstinately anthropological mind, shall regret that the beginnings of our national life are veiled in the Ante-Photographic era—that we may invest them with qualities we wish they might have had, as well as with those qualities of which we think we know? Who shall say that humanity, A. P., dwelling in a softening haze beyond the harshly illuminated era of Realism, is worse off than humanity thereafter? Looking at the matter practically, who shall regret that Lady Washington never had her pretty head in a vise, her face masked a ghastly white with powder to make her countenance more actinic, and her eyes instructed to glare at a fixed point for upward of sixty mortal seconds! Surely there are some compensations in being handed down like the Iliad or the masonic ritual by word of mouth rather than by agencies associated with the arrogant stare of the lens.
But, after all, we do not conduct the trial wholly with expert witnesses, and the camera has been a useful commentator—perhaps we are more willing to say that it will be than that it has been, though we never shall surpass in delicately literal perfection the image of the daguerreotype. A new confusion may arise from the fact that photography wants to be more than a science—is tired of being literal, and seeks to be an art. If it shall become an art—that is to say, an agency of personal opinion—posterity must, like ourselves, go on being influenced in its judgments of pictorial fact by the expressions of art, which the world has been doing from the beginning of time.
Certainly it would be very hard for us to think of the English girl, for example, however well we might know her personally, without feeling the influence of the English artists, of Romney, and Reynolds, and Sir John Millais, and Sir Frederick Leighton, and the multitudinous expressions of her from the pencil of the author of “Trilby.” Du Maurier’s English girl is an image, agreeable or not according to one’s taste, which we cannot get out of our minds. A number of years before he achieved a second fame by writing romances, Du Maurier made a sketch in which he undertook to indicate his idea of a pretty woman. He wrote of his ideal at that time: “She is rather tall, I admit, and a trifle stiff; but English women are tall and stiff just now; and she is rather too serious; but that is only because I find it so difficult, with a mere stroke of black ink, to indicate the enchanting little curved lines that go from the nose to the mouth corners, causing the cheeks to make a smile—and without them the smile is incomplete.” I always have been glad to hear Mr. Ruskin say of the Venus of Melos, with her “tranquil, regular and lofty features,” that she “could not hold her own for a moment against the beauty of a simple English girl, of pure race and kind heart.”
And in the same way our notion of the American girl, of the typical American girl, is inevitably affected by the pictures we see of her. Our illustrators naturally have the best opportunity to mould our judgments in this matter. I recall hearing one woman say of another at a tea: “That girl is always sitting around in Gibson poses.” They used to say the same thing in England of the girls who imitated Du Maurier. Thus we see that the illustrator of life not only is reflecting but creating forms and manners; and if you would know not merely what the American girl is, but what she is going to be, study the picture-makers and story-makers who influence her.
Mr. Gibson would have us believe that Miss America is essentially a statuesque girl, that, in general, there are good chances that she will be tall, commanding, well-dressed, rather English in the shoulders. Mr. Wenzell and Mr. Smedley present her to us as more willowy, with more of what, if we had to go abroad for a prototype, we should be obliged to call French grace and lightness. We have been under the spell of the girl Castaigne can draw, have enjoyed the dainty femininity pictured by Toaspern and Sterner and Mrs. Stephens. None has grudged a flattering stroke, a prophetic outline. It is the old story. If we are to measure a nation’s civilization by the degree of its deference to women, we surely shall find much to confuse us in art, which in all lands, like some joyous, enthusiastic child, always has heaped unstinted homage at the feet of its goddesses, its Madonnas, its Magdalens and its nymphs; which always has been ready to give to its fruit-venders and flower-girls in the market-place the same refined beauty it bestows upon its princesses; which has made its Pandoras beautiful with no sign of resentment for any mischief its Pandoras ever may have done, grateful only for the privilege of saying to the world as to her precious private self, that she is very charming indeed. Germany, while sending women to the plough, paints her radiantly as a deity, and when England was selling wives at the end of a halter in the market-place, there was no abatement in the ardor of her artistic tributes to feminine loveliness.
While the American artist has painted Miss America appreciatively, with an enthusiasm creditable alike to his art and to his patriotism, and seldom, surely, in the spirit of one who could say, “she is rather stiff just now,” unquestionably, like the rest of us, he has been bothered at times by the fact that she is so various, that she has so many pictorial as well as temperamental and (may I say) vocal variations.
There are several reasons why she should be various. The “Mayflower” was a small ship and could not hold all of our ancestors. Like the English who followed after the Conqueror, some of our ancestors had to be content to “come over” at a later time, some of them at a shockingly recent date. Thus we have greater divergences in type than exist in countries wherein the “coming over” process was neither so protracted nor from so many points of the compass. The American girl blossoms like the pansy in so many and in such unexpected shades and combinations that science falters, and bewildered art, determined to paint types that will “stay put,” bolts for Brittany and sulkily draws sabots and the Norman nose. We are a vast anthropological department store in which the polite sociological clerk will show you human goods, not only in the primary colors, but in every conceivable tint and texture; and when you ask him, Is this foreign or domestic? he lies to meet the requirements. Yes, Miss America sometimes, like our cotton, “comes over” a second time with a foreign label, which is puzzling!
It is our habit to think that the American girl of English ancestry presents precisely the right modification of the—what shall I call it?—austerity of the purely English type, and which scorns the melancholy of Burne-Jones and Rossetti. The American girl of German parents is conspicuously with us, and very often is found supplying a fascinatingly fair phase without which our galaxy scarcely would be complete, adding a delightful sparkle to the demureness which we might not find so modified in Berlin or Bremen. The American girl of French parentage is found uniting the traits of the people which has produced De Staël, and Récamier and George Sand, to the perhaps not greatly different vivacity of l’Américaine. We trace the auburn tresses of the Scottish lass, the teasing Irish eyes, the winsome oval of the Dutch face. We see the too emphatic contrasts of the Spanish, the Italian and the Russian types mellowed and refined; while Oriental blood, the civilized African, the octoroon and the occasional Asiatic each add an element of picturesque variety.
And this is not saying a word about the differentiating fact that this is a big country, and that Miss America in one section is by no means the same as Miss America in another. I do not mean to say that when we meet her in or from Boston we always know her by sight, but when we come to average her in that neighborhood we are able to see clearly enough that her quality is distinctive, that it is different from the quality of Miss America elsewhere—in New York, for example, where, by a trivial tradition, she is supposed to lay less stress upon intellectuality, but where, under whatever guise of habit or manner, you will find that she knows enough and has what she knows sufficiently at her command to make you nervous. Again, the Philadelphia girl upsets your preconceived notions, if you are foolish enough to have these, by being nothing that suggests even remote relationship to the bronze Quaker on the municipal tower. It is the familiar joke that the Boston girl asks what you know, that the New York girl asks what you own, and that the Philadelphia girl asks who your grandfather was. If this amiable satire should have any foundation in fact, I wonder what the Chicago girl is expected to ask. I myself have a theory, not wholly dissociated from experience, that she does not ask anything, being content to know that she, personifying the great traditionless middle west, has been called the hardest riddle of them all.
And, as I have said, we must admit that geography has much to do with the case. Does any one deny that climate and history have made the Kentucky girl a being apart—that the Kentucky horses which she has ridden with so much spirit have had their effect in her whole style and personality? Could we fail to look for a distinctive flowering in the verdant slopes beyond the Sierras or amid that intensely American human environment on the plains of Texas? Have you heard the Creole sing? Have you heard the music of the Georgia girl’s talk? Have you ever let a Virginia girl drive you, or danced with Miss Maryland?
A southern dance! Perhaps it is inevitable that we should find ourselves thinking of the Continental and early Federal society; of old Georgetown and the powdered heads, and the minuet, and the blinking candles behind the darkey orchestra; of the clinking swords of the young Revolutionary soldiers, and the satin breeches of the foreign lordlings, studying the precocious young republic and the young republic’s daughters: of the quaint gowns Miss America used to wear, and the taunting little caps and head-dresses, reflecting now the whimsies of the Empire, now the furbelows of the Restoration, and always her engagingly different self. Yes, time is working its wizard tricks up and down the land, slowly here and quickly there, now (as it might seem) in a romantic spirit, and again in brusque paradoxical contrast to the thing we expect.
We live quickly hereabouts, and to say that the vast changes which have taken place in our national life have been mostly external is not to say that the spectacle is on that account any easier to understand. In an especial degree social situation with us, like the age limit defining old maids, is wholly relative, subject to continual change. To the foreign spectator who ignores this relativity, the American girl naturally is bewildering, and we are likely to find her typified in foreign comment in the words which Schlegel irreverently applied to Portia, as a “rich, beautiful, clever heiress.” No, the typical American girls are not all heiresses, nor all cow-camp heroines. They were not always demure in the colonies, nor are they always disconcertingly self-possessed in our own time. The girls with whom Lafayette went sled-riding on the Newburg hills do not actually appear to have been amazingly different from those who teased the Prince of Wales in the fifties (I mean our fifties), nor from those who sent in their cards to Li Hung Chang in the nineties. It is very shocking to us moderns, who let women preach and plead and vote, to learn of the number of elopements in the days when women were theoretically tethered to the spinning-wheel and forbidden everything but hypocrisy. Which is to say, perhaps, that how much we shall regard as distinctive in the modern woman may depend upon how little we happen to know of the woman who has gone before.
But time and place must leave their mark, and Miss America, though she be like changeable silk, of varying hue in varying lights, is undoubtedly, being the precocious product of a new era in new territory, a new variety in the species, as new as if she were grotesquely instead of subtly different. And in her presence the American himself frequently seems to be awed and quelled, like the Greek hero when Athena’s “dreadful eyes shone upon him.” His devotion to her has excited derision; his deference has been misconstrued, his boastful admiration has been catalogued as characteristic. Italy once spoke of England as “the paradise of women”; and England in a later day began to say the same thing about the United States, which may or may not have something to do with the “star of empire,” and probably, in any case, has some definite relation to the Anglo-Saxon spirit, concerning which so much has been said of late. As for Miss America herself, the sovereignty at which the foreign observer marvels is a real appearance, however profound the misapprehension of its philosophy. Miss America is no illusion, if some spectators have doubted their senses.
By the grace of nature she is that she is. If the American man continues to pay her the supreme compliment of not understanding her, that is his affair. It always is easier to perceive the other’s folly than our own—especially when the exciting cause is a woman. We know better than the spectator why we permit certain seeming tyrannies! We analyze the American girl in a purely Pickwickian spirit, not because we expect actually to discover facts, but for the immediate pleasure of the speculation. We neither seek nor assume to comprehend this marvellous organism. We know better. When we pretend to delineate the American girl it is in the spirit of Fielding’s aside in “Tom Jones”: “We mention this observation not with any view of pretending to account for so odd a behavior, but lest some critic should hereafter plume himself on discovering it.”