One day it happened with me, as with many another impatient traveler, that I had to spend two hours between trains in a certain obscure town. Perhaps I should say, in a certain obscure railway station, for the town was singularly vague, uninviting and irresponsive, not at all the sort of place that one would expect to know what to do with. It was, indeed, the fragment of a town, as if, in the sprinkling of villages along the railway, the material at this point ran short, leaving barely a sufficient supply of elemental features. And being confronted by the unprofitableness of the prospect,—by the drowsy, straggling street, running (the word sounds ironical) from the station, the unfriendly stare of the town hall, plastered over with play bills; the sunburned whiteness of the little church; the obvious taciturnity of the man smoking in front of the general merchandise store,—I bought the local paper, for there was a local paper, with a “patent outside,” that occurred every Friday morning. And the first thing that struck my eye in the local paper was a conspicuous headline: “What is Going on in Society.”
I had seen the thing before in other papers, in Chicago, in Boston, in Washington, in Atlanta, and in the provincial habit that falls to a man who thinks of life from the view-point of a big city, I had associated the line with something very different from any conditions that seemed likely to be present here. I looked out of the station window at the little white church, at the chromatic town hall, at the general merchandise store, at a neat girl with a tan cape who was coming down the main street,—and turned with curiosity to the society column.
It was just the same as any other. It had all the adjectives of New York, or Richmond, or St. Louis, and if Voltaire had been reading it he might have hesitated to say that the adjective is the enemy of the noun. Evidently, too, the same things were going on that were going on elsewhere in society. It appeared especially that Miss Effie So-and-So had just “come out,” and that the event was signalized on Monday evening by a dance which was described at length as to the spacious drawing-rooms, the floral devices, the orchestra behind the fringe of palms, the cotillion, the favors, the elegant gown of Miss So-and-So’s mother, the gowns and ornaments of the other feminine guests, in detail, with a cordial closing word for the refreshments, which had been served at eleven o’clock. On Tuesday night there had been a birthday dance at the Sheriff’s, at which “society was largely represented”; at a pink tea on Wednesday afternoon there had been some novel decorations at small tables; and on Thursday evening the young ladies of the Polaris Club had gone over to Sudley’s with Mrs. So-and-So as chaperon. There was more as to a festival in preparation by the ladies of the First Church, as to a euchre party for the following Thursday, and as to a little surprise which it was whispered that “some society men” were arranging for the close of the season.
Here, certainly, was food for thought. Could anything more piquantly have illustrated the relativity of the term Society, more brilliantly have demolished the pretension that Society has any geography? We have our book definitions, by which we agree glibly to say that society is the cultured, the fashionable, the favored class (or elsewise, according to your dictionary) of “any community”; but how easy it is for city pretence (and provincialism is never so arrogant as in big cities) to see in its own set the true title to social eminence. It is indicative of that interesting individualism which prevails in the United States, and which perhaps we may learn to prize as one of the precious products of democracy, that no town regards itself as small in any sense that shall restrict or disqualify its individuals. This is particularly true of towns in their feminine population. You may find a community without gas, electric light, telephones or a board of trade, but you shall not on that account decide that it is too small to have a woman’s club and a social calendar. We are accustomed to say that it all is a question of degree.
We are accustomed to admit that in the senate of society even the small states shall say their say. But scarcely can we realize without much travel how far the fact that this country is too big for the focussing of society in any one, two, or dozen places, affects the demeanor and development of the social units. The fact that there are widely prevalent formulæ, helps us first to the assumption, safe enough, that these are applied, that there is a wish and an occasion to use them in some way. They help us further to an estimate of the relative activity of social forces, to the points of emphasis. But there is one thing the wide use of formulæ never will help you to find out, and that is the most interesting fact of all—the local flavor of the conformity. Society is an Established Church in whose pews the dissenters form a majority; and if I could, by some chance, have let my train go by and have been admitted into the circle of that village society, I certainly should have found that while it gave a sort of lip-service to the social creeds, this society had its own way of doing so, and that it adopted lightheartedly, like its new byword or improved flounce, certain phrases, certain dicta of the world’s larger social groups, for its own purposes, with its own reservations. I do not deny that I have seen social formulæ grimly and mechanically used in certain quarters, but the whimsical reservation is more characteristic.
The American girl is so definitely a social creature, and her social attributes are so personal, that she never appears to be dependent upon social machinery. She brings into society the invaluable force of her individual availability. That our social groups seem to cohere proves that she must possess in some degree that deference to form which begins in the acceptance of terms. Humanity can never pair well until it has grouped well. Grouping is the beginning of that compromise which reaches its crisis in pairing. Even the goddess of democracy, who is presumed to dote upon calling a spade a spade, who hates the euphemisms of effete monarchical society, may not despise the butler’s baritone or the futility of attempting on one occasion six hundred different forms of adieu. Even George Eliot admitted that “a little unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged in under the stress of social intercourse.” The trouble with unpremeditated insincerities, however, is that you often wish you hadn’t said them, not (unfortunately for the symmetry of the retribution) because they were insincere, but because they were unpremeditated and inferior. It is much safer to be unpremeditated with sincerities than with insincerities, and, as the literature of social satire may help us to see, there is great hazard in any case. It is a pity, perhaps, that the great advantages of meeting your kind in your and their best clothes, must be bought so dearly, yet, as Thackeray has observed, “if we may not speak of the lady who has just left the room, what is to become of conversation and society?”
Social custom is so arbitrary that it might be, and doubtless would be, a reckless and inconclusive thing for any one to assume that the American girl in society is actually so radical as her reputation in other avenues might suggest. I believe that it is quite commonly agreed that while the French girl in society is, perforce, much more reserved than the American, the English girl at a ball or an “evening” exhibits a freedom from restraint not commonly seen in America. These things, however, count for little except as showing the domination of mere form, for there can be no doubt that in social life, using the term broadly, the American girl has more liberty, and uses more liberty than the English girl. If the privileges of a host’s roof are liberally construed by the English girl, the American girl takes a candid and undaunted view of a hotel and a public ballroom; and under conditions which in any manner detach her from the immediate presence of formality, she falls back upon her individual preferences, her personally developed methods of meeting situations, with a readiness and sureness that carry their own vindication. Because she can have a developed individuality yet be no rebel, the American girl can grasp and enjoy liberty without despising authority. Indeed, her very possession of liberty must develop a certain personal conservatism which as a mere subject of authority she might never acquire. A great many fantastic things which at various times have been said about the American girl might appear to have been uttered in ignorance of the fact that there is an American mother.
I have in mind a family living in Washington city, where there is, as everyone knows, a highly seasoned and heterogeneous society, a society utterly different from any that is to be met with elsewhere in this country, and one which on that account offers peculiarly excellent opportunities for study on the part of those foreign observers who enjoy being misled about us. If there is any place in the United States where the American mother has opportunity for her administrative genius, it is at the national capital. The peculiar conditions created by political, diplomatic and administrative forces in the capital of a republic, the prevalence of the open door, and the presence of both domestic and foreign transients who do not always appreciate the limitations of liberal custom, make Washington a place apart. A single instance may serve to illustrate the firmness of the women who actually control social destiny. Under circumstances which it is not necessary to detail, a certain elegant attaché of one of the legations began calling upon the young lady of the family I have named. He was a handsome and entertaining young man, easy with women and cordial with men, glib in the arts, himself a good singer, and speaking English with a fascinating inflection. One evening the mother said quietly to the daughter: “Grace, the next time the Count calls I wish that you would ask to be excused.” The daughter looked her astonishment. She was not greatly interested in the count, yet he was very agreeable, and she said so. But her mother said, “Grace, you must trust me.” And when the count came again he was made to understand.
It was a simple, unsensational incident, but because I knew the liberal ethics of the mother and the apparently complete independence of the daughter (she was twenty-three) the incident the more effectively reminded me that though the American mother does not feel it incumbent upon her to closely hover over her offspring with a solicitous wing, she not the less observes and governs. It so happened that the gilded count a few months later became involved in so gross a scandal that his withdrawal from Washington became imperative. Influence in his government saved him from worse annoyance than transfer to another court. The mother’s instinct had been true. And who can doubt that a liberally reared girl, when she herself assumes the office of mother, will, without having to make sinister payment for her knowledge, be the better equipped for a judgment of the world in the interest of those who may be dependent upon her authority?
That the American mother cares more for real than for apparent authority, explains, to those who know, the visible and so often misleading detachment of the daughter; and the daughter’s sense of a dependence that is not irksome, a suzerainty that is not intrusive, a mother care that has no vanity of assertion, appears in her freer bearing, her finer self-reliance. Whatever her special gifts, meeting her socially always is likely to have the charm associated with the fact that she never is afraid either that she will not rise to the occasion or that she will offend authority. She has not the first fear because she is playing her own game. She has not the second because she does not live in a threatening or too admonitory shadow.
You think of these things sometimes when you sit opposite a fan. Her fan! Have you not seen it blot out at the critical moment all that was worth looking at in the world? Have you not realized that it is part of her panoply? Have you not witnessed over and over again the genius which she exhibits in the management of accessories? Have you not heard in the flutter of her fan a note from that orchestra of sounds in which she makes even her silk petticoat play a witching part?
With her fan you quite naturally associate those two absolutely unanswerable arguments—an American girl’s eyes. They are different, believe me, these American eyes, from any other sort. The women of no other country can look at you that way. You must admit, and in some degree understand this, or you cannot hope to understand Miss America in society or anywhere else. You may say of her eyes what Darwin hinted of eyes in general, that they are the supreme physical paradox. They do not peer like the virgin eyes of poetical tradition. It has been complained that they have not at all the inquiring look once thought to be so winsome in the young. They seem to know, yet they are too feminine to assert. We say hard things about the poets nowadays, but who can blame the poets for becoming emotional over her eyes? Are eyes ever more a mystery, a contradiction, an uncombattable force than when Miss America turns upon us her gentle yet fearless, her wise yet maidenly orbs? We may have planned a battle. We may have girded ourselves for a glance toward these twin guns in that implacable turret, but at the first encounter our bravado withers. When she uses these weapons as she pre-eminently knows how, we declare the motion carried—the eyes have it.
So soon as we grasp the fact that Miss America can look and talk, we are in a fair way to understand some of the secrets of her power. It is quite generally admitted that she talks well, and very seldom, I think, with any disparaging reservation. She is a good talker. She is more; she is a good conversationalist, for she can listen. If speech is silver and silence is golden, I am free to admit that Miss America does not seem to believe altogether in the gold standard. She appears to be somewhat of a bi-metallist. I don’t blame her; and I always admire her method of dealing with men who believe in the free silver of continuous talk.
Her reserve here is characteristic of her agreeable poise in society whenever and wherever she is called upon to say the right thing at the right time. She never exhibits stage fright, though she has confessed (afterward) to the symptoms. If, like Isabella, she is “loth to speak so indirectly,” she doesn’t show it. She may, indeed, like the Venus of Melos, be disarmed, but she never will be found, like the Winged Victory, to have lost her head. Foreigners sometimes have said that Miss America talks too loudly, but I am sure that this effect arises from her vivacity, and one might retort that if her enunciation ever is more than necessarily audible the chances are all in favor of your being glad that you did not miss a word.
Sometimes she has a way of talking to you at an oblique angle. She likes to banter while she pours tea, for example, parrying and thrusting with the agility of one of those Viennese girls who know how to fence with a blade in each hand. When Mme. De Staël declared that conversation, “like talent, exists only in France,” Miss America had not grown up. It still is true, probably, as Mrs. Poyser pointed out, that a woman “can count a stocking top while a man’s gitting his tongue ready.” Man’s development has been distressingly slow. He never has met but indifferently the supreme test of the tête-à-tête. It may be that his habits of life dispose him to take an exaggerated, sometimes even a morbid, view of the hazard of words. Regarding the situation solemnly is fatal to facility. The situation is not, and cannot be, intrinsically solemn, being devised to get away from solemnity. The talk is no more momentous than the tea. Neither is an end, but only a means. “It grieves my heart,” cried Addison, “to see a couple of proud, idle flirts sipping their tea for a whole afternoon in a room hung round with the industry of their great-grandmothers.” Now this comment, surely, represents a most unwholesome frame of mind, subversive of that relaxation which Delsarte and many charming women disciples have bidden us cultivate.
Alas! it would be a good thing if sipping tea for a whole afternoon in one room were the worst sin practised by our young women. Sipping tea in a dozen rooms on the same afternoon is surely a worse matter. In the days when people gave up a whole afternoon to a call, conversational stitching and tea drinking were reduced to a science, and gossip to a fine art. In a later day, when the author of the Synthetic Philosophy found occasion to marvel over and to lament the velocity with which men and women were going about their affairs in this country, calling customs had utterly changed. If our women had undertaken to perpetuate throughout the year the New Year’s Day habits of the sociable Dutch of Manhattan, they could not have been more successful. The potency of pasteboard and the human imagination have not greatly diminished the pressure, and will not so long as the intoxication of mere rapidity continues to preserve its power. The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table has colloquially expressed the distressing celerity with which certain classes of fashionable women rush in, laugh, talk, eat and disappear, in the tersely alliterative “giggle, gabble, gobble, git.”
These habits are, of course, utterly destructive of good talk. Modern society talk under the pressure of numbers and a consent to oscillate violently, is like the scattered fragments of a word game. A man—I cannot speak for a woman—emerges from a “crush” with fresh emotions toward the grotesquely ironical definition of words as the vehicle of thought.
Gossip
However, I am glad to think that Miss America does not seek to revive the spectacular talking such as women did in the days of the old French salons. A woman talking to a dozen men at the same time may have been a charming affair. Mme. Récamier is credited with having done it very well. But no sane and truthful man ever will admit his contentment with the microscopic fragment of a woman’s attention. Exclusive interest in a woman is undoubtedly a primitive instinct, yet the great deference paid to success in the tête-à-tête well may justify this instinctive preference, and those hostesses surely will be most successful who devise some liberty for this instinct. The tendency of our social life is doubtless against centralization. There can be no more monologists, it seems. “The worst of hearing Carlyle,” said Margaret Fuller, “is that you cannot interrupt him.” The modern social gathering, whatever its aims or variations, is quite sure at least of this quality,—that it will interrupt. We cannot deny that even “One-Minute Conversations with Nice Girls” is an experience having its compensations as well as its drawbacks, for while a few eloquent seconds with many women may not be so desirable in some ways as many eloquent seconds with one woman, it always must be difficult to know beforehand just when this will be the case. Mr. Warner has shrewdly pointed out that some women are interesting for five minutes, some for ten, some for an hour; “some,” he adds, “are not exhausted in a whole day; and some (and this shows the signal leniency of Providence) are perennially entertaining, even in the presence of masculine stupidity.” The trouble is (as you might guess) that the interruption always cuts you off at the end of three minutes with the girl who would be interesting for a whole day. For aught I know, society may have averaged this thing, and have discovered that the low limit is safest, that it leaves both parties most completely in possession of the benefit of the doubt. But how few men can start a new conversation every ninety seconds with anything like the success that attends a woman’s efforts to do the same thing?
No, woman, who created Society with its capital letter, has succeeded, whether by design or accident, in producing a situation in which she is placed at a very definite advantage. She can riddle a man with deadly small shot before he can roll up his heavy guns. Yet she never will like the man who either refuses the close order or surrenders. She will like him best if he “puts up a good fight.” If he stammers, she knows just how to deal with his broken English and keep him going. Quot linguae, tot homines. But you cannot multiply a woman that way. One language is all that she needs. Small talk is a large question. As the loose change of vocal currency, it is an indispensable commodity. The larger denominations are not available. As for cashing an intellectual check, good as your credit may be, it is out of the question altogether; and a wise man recognizes the fact that in the matter of this commodity woman is a banker who must always pocket a margin.
One day in a far Southwestern city the belle of the place drove me in a dogcart for a memorable half hour. She was no taller than I, but she wore a magnificent hat, one of those hats which even the girl could not make you forget, and as she sat on the “dinky,” she arose beside me in a quelling contrast. The horse was a smart stepper (at least that is my confused impression), the road demanded a discriminating rein; but though we drove past the leading hotel in the crisis of the event, and drew the fire of a hundred eyes, that girl’s delightful wit never faltered nor forsook her, that is to say, never forsook me; for, of course, I needed a helping hand. No man not specifically trained to it could gracefully maintain himself at such an altitude with any credit to his power of speech. When I recall that dashing day, the roll of the cart, the flutter of those lofty feathers, the firm grace of those little gloved hands, the healthy glow of the face I looked up to, I feel an accentuated humility, a deep conviction of my oral inferiority.
In society, as elsewhere, woman often reminds us of her superiority to the algebraic axiom that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. There are qualified ways in which a man may be equal to society. But to say that he is equal to a woman—that is another matter.
You will remind me that society is not wholly a matter of talk, large or small. This is very true. Among other things, it is a matter of clothes.