The Art of Living
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It would be an excellent thing for the American girl if her eyes could be definitely opened to the fact that her parents, particularly her mother, are much more clever than she supposes, and that they are really her best counsellors. But on the other hand, is not the American mother herself chiefly responsible for this attitude of loving contempt and sweet but unfilial condescension on the part of her own flesh and blood? It sometimes seems as though we had fallen victims to our reluctance to thwart our children in any way lest we should destroy their love for us. But is it much preferable to be loved devotedly as foolish, weak, and amiable old things, than to be feared a little as individuals capable of exercising authority and having opinions of our own?
This yielding, self-abnegating tendency on the part of parents, and consequent filial tyranny, are especially conspicuous in the case of that arch despot, the summer girl. I admit her fascination unreservedly, and am willing to concede that she has run the gauntlet of criticism hurled at her by the effete civilizations with an unblemished reputation. Though she may have become a little more conservative and conventional out of deference to good taste, she is still able to be lost in caves or stranded on islands with any young man of her acquaintance without bringing a blush to any cheek except that of the horror-stricken foreigner. But having admitted this, I am obliged to charge her with trampling on the prostrate form of her mother from the first of July to the first of October. She does so to a certain extent the year round, but the summer is the crowning season of her despotism.
The first concern of the American father and mother in making plans for the summer is to go to some place which the children will like, and the summer girl in particular. This is natural and in keeping with the unselfish devotion shown by the present generation of parents toward their children. But it is one thing to endeavor to select a place which will be satisfactory to one’s eighteen-year-old daughter and another to be sweetly hectored by that talented young woman into going to some place selected by her of which you entirely disapprove. And just here it is that the American mother almost seems to be convicted of the feebleness of intellect ascribed to her by the newly created species. You, the father, are just screwing your courage up to say that you will be blessed if you will go to a summer hotel at Narragansett Pier (or wherever it is), when your wife, who has been cowed or cajoled by the despot in the interim, flops completely, as the saying is, and joins an almost tearful support to the summer girl’s petition. And there you are. What are you to do? Daughter and mother, the apple of your eye and the angel of your heart, leagued against you. Resistance becomes impossible, unless you are ready to incur the reputation of being a stony-hearted old curmudgeon.
The summer girl invariably wishes to go where it is gay. Her idea of enjoyment does not admit domesticity and peaceful relaxation. She craves to be actively amused, if not blissfully excited. It is not strange that the tastes and sentiments of young persons from seventeen to twenty-three should differ considerably from those of mothers and fathers from forty to fifty, and it speaks well for the intelligence and unselfishness of middle-aged parents and guardians in this country that they so promptly recognize the legitimate claims of youth, and even are eager to give young people a chance to enjoy themselves before the cares of life hedge them in. But have we not gone to the other extreme? Is it meet that we should regard ourselves as moribund at fifty, and sacrifice all our own comfort and happiness in order to let a young girl have her head, and lead a life in summer of which we heartily disapprove? It is not an exaggeration to state that there is a growing disposition on the part of the rising hordes of young men and girls to regard any one in society over thirty-five as a fossil and an encumbrance, for whom, in a social sense, the grave is yawning. It is not uncommon to hear a comely matron of forty described as a frump by a youth scarcely out of his teens, and every old gentleman of thirty-nine has experienced the tactless pity which fashionable maidens under twenty-one endeavor to conceal in the presence of his senility.
The summer girl is generally a young person who has been a winter girl for nine months. I am quite aware that some girls are much more effective in summer than at any other season, and it may be that in certain cases they appear to so little advantage in winter that to attempt to gratify parental inclinations at their expense would be rank unkindness. But it is safe to allege that the average summer girl in this country has been doing all she ought to do in the way of dancing, prancing, gadding, going, working, and generally spending her vital powers in the autumn, winter, and spring immediately preceding, and consequently when summer comes needs, quite as much as her parents, physical, mental, and moral ozone. But what does she prefer to do? Whither is she bent on leading her father by the nose with the assistance of her mother? To various places, according to her special predilection, and the farthest limit of the parental purse. If possible, to one of the gayest watering-places, where she hopes to bathe, play tennis, walk, talk, and drive during the day; paddle, stroll, or sit out during the evening, and dance until twelve o’clock at night two or three times a week. Else to some much-advertised mountain cataract or lake resort, to lead a stagnant hotel corridor and piazza life, in the fond hope of seeing the vividly imagined Him alight from the stage-coach some Saturday night. Meanwhile she is one of three-score forlorn girls who haunt the office and make eyes at the hotel clerk. The summer girl has a mania for the summer hotel. It seems to open to her radiant possibilities. She kindles at the mention of a hop in August, and if she is musical, the tinkle of her piano playing reverberates through the house all day until the other boarders are driven nearly crazy. In the gloaming after supper she flits off from the house with her best young man of the moment, and presently her mother is heard bleating along the piazza, “My Dorothy has gone without her shawl, and will catch her death a cold.”
And so it goes all summer. When autumn comes and the leaf is about to fall, and Dorothy returns to town, what has she to show for it? A little tan and a callous heart, a promised winter correspondence with the hotel clerk, new slang, some knack at banjo-playing, and considerable uncertainty in her mind as to whom she is engaged to, or whether she is engaged at all. And like as not the doctor is sent for to build her up for the winter with cod-liver oil and quinine. There is too much ozone at some of these summer hotels.
We cannot hope to do away wholly with either the summer hotel or the fashionable watering-place by the assertion of parental authority. Such an endeavor, indeed, would on the whole be an unjust as well as fruitless piece of virtue. The delightful comradeship between young men and young women, which is one of our national products, is typified most saliently by the summer girl and her attendant swains. Naturally she wishes to go to some place where swains are apt to congregate; and the swain is always in search of her. Moreover, the summer hotel must continue to be the summer home of thousands who, for one reason or another, have no cottage or abandoned farm. My plea is still the same, however. Why, now that the negro slave is free, and the workingman is being legislated into peace and plenty, and the wrongs of other women are being righted, should not the American mother try to burst her bonds? It would be a much more simple matter than it seems, for, after all, she has her own blood in her veins, and she has only to remember what a dogmatic person she herself was in the days of her youth. If the code of fathers and mothers, instead of that of girls and boys, were in force at our summer hotels and watering-places, a very different state of affairs would soon exist; and that, too, without undue interference with that inherent, cherished, and unalienable right of the American daughter, the maiden’s choice. We must not forget that though our civilization boasts the free exercise of the maiden’s choice as one of the brightest jewels in the crown of republican liberties, the crowded condition of our divorce courts forbids us to be too demonstrative in our self-satisfaction.
It would be dire, indeed, to bore the young person, especially the summer girl. But does it necessarily follow that a summer home or a summer life indicated by the parent would induce such a disastrous result? I am advising neither a dungeon, a convent, nor some excruciatingly dull spot to which no fascinating youth is likely to penetrate. Verily, even the crowded bathing beach may not corrupt, provided that wise motherly control and companionship point out the dangers and protect the forming soul, mind, and manners, instead of allowing them to be distorted and poisoned by the ups and downs of promiscuous amatory summer guerilla warfare. But may it not happen, when the maternal foot is once firmly put down, that the summer girl will not be so easily bored as she or her mother fears, and will even be grateful for protection against her own ignorance and inexperience? Boating, sketching, riding, reading, bicycling, travel, sewing, and photography are pastimes which ought not to bore her, and would surely leave her more refreshed in the autumn than continuous gadding, dancing, and flirtation. To be a member of a small, pleasant colony, where the days are passed simply and lazily, yet interestingly; where the finer senses are constantly appealed to by the beauties of nature and the healthful character of one’s occupations, is a form of exile which many a summer girl would accommodate herself to gladly if she only understood what it was like, and understood, moreover, that the selection of a summer programme had ceased to be one of her prerogatives. A determined man who wishes to marry will discover the object of his affections on an abandoned farm or in the heart of the Maine woods, if he is worth his salt. In these days of many yachts and bicycles true love can travel rapidly, and there is no occasion for marriageable girls to select courting-grounds where their lovers can have close at hand a Casino and other conveniences, including the opportunity to flirt with their next best Dulcineas.
If the summer-time is the time in which to recuperate and lie fallow, why should we have so many summer schools? After the grand panjandrum of Commencement exercises at the colleges is over, there ought to be a pause in the intellectual activity of the nation for at least sixty days; yet there seems to be a considerable body of men and women who, in spite of the fact that they exercise their brains vigorously during the rest of the year, insist on mental gymnastics when the thermometer is in the eighties. These schools – chiefly assemblies in the name of the ologies and osophies – bring together more or less people more or less learned, from all over the country, to talk at one another and read papers.
Judging merely from the newspaper accounts of their proceedings, it is almost invariably impossible to discover the exact meaning of anything which is uttered, but this may be due to the absence of the regular reporters on their annual vacations, and the consequent delegation to tyros of the difficult duty in question. But even assuming that the utterances of the summer schools are both intelligible and stimulating, would not the serious-minded men and women concerned in them be better off lying in a hammock under a wide-spreading beech-tree, or, if this seems too relaxing an occupation, watching the bathers at Narragansett Pier? There is wisdom sometimes in sending young and very active boys to school for about an hour a day in summer, in order chiefly to know where they are and to prevent them from running their legs off; but with this exception the mental workers in this country, male and female, young and old, can afford to close their text-books with a bang on July 1st, and not peep at them again until September. Philosophy in August has much the flavor of asparagus in January.
The Case of Man
I
A not inconsiderable portion of the women of the United States is inclined to regard man as a necessary evil. Their point of view is that he is here, and therefore is likely, for the present at least, to remain a formidable figure in human affairs, but that his ways are not their ways, that they disapprove of them and him, and that they intend to work out their lives and salvation as independently of him as possible. What man in the flush and prime of life has not been made conscious of this attitude of the modern woman? She is constantly passing us in the street with the manner of one haughtily and supremely indifferent. There are women enough still who look patterns of modesty, and yet let us feel at the same time that we are more or less an object of interest to them; but this particular type sails by in her trig and often stylish costume with the air not merely of not seeing us, but of wishing to ignore us. Her compressed lips suggest a judgment; a judgment born of meditated conviction which leaves no hope of reconsideration or exception. “You are all substantially alike,” she seems to say, “and we have had enough of you. Go your ways and we will go ours.”
The Mecca of the modern woman’s hopes, as indicated by this point of view, would appear to be the ultimate disappearance of man from the face of the earth after the manner of the mastodon and other brutes. Nor are her hopes balked by physiological barriers. She is prepared to admit that it is not obvious, as yet, how girls alone are to be generated and boy babies given the cold maternal shoulder; but she trusts to science and the long results of time for a victory which will eliminate sexual relations and all their attendant perplexities and tragedies from the theatre of human life.
We are not so sanguine as she that the kingdom of heaven is to be brought to pass in any so simple and purely feminine a fashion. That is, we men. Perhaps we are fatuous, but we see no reason to doubt that sexual relations will continue to the crack of doom, in spite of the perplexities and tragedies consequent upon them; and moreover, that man will continue to thrive like a young bay-tree, even though she continues to wear a chip on her tailor-made shoulder. And yet at the same time we feel sober. It is not pleasant to be regarded as brutes and to have judgment passed upon us by otherwise attractive women. It behooves us to scratch our heads and ask ourselves if we can possibly merit the haughty indifference and thinly disguised contempt which is entertained toward us. To be weighed in the balance and found wanting by a serene and beautiful young person is a far from agreeable experience. There must be something wrong with us, and if so, what is it?
Of course there was a time – and not so very long ago – when men were tyrants and kept women under. Nowadays the only thing denied them in polite circles is to whisk around by themselves after dark, and plenty of them do that. The law is giving them, with both hands, almost everything they ask for nearly as rapidly as existing inequalities are pointed out, and the right of suffrage is withheld from them only because the majority of women are still averse to exercising it. Man, the tyrant and highwayman, has thrown up his arms and is allowing woman to pick his pockets. He is not willing to have her bore a hole in his upper lip, and drag him behind her with a rope, but he is disposed to consent to any reasonable legislative changes which she desires to have made, short of those which would involve masculine disfigurement or depreciation. It certainly cannot be his bullying qualities which have attracted her disdain, for he has given in. If woman to-day finds that the law discriminates unjustly between her and man, she has merely to ask for relief in sufficient numbers to show that she is not the tool of designing members of her own sex, in order to obtain it.
Under the spur of these reflections I consulted my wife by way of obtaining light on this problem. “Barbara, why is it that modern women of a certain type are so sniffy toward men? You know what I mean; they speak to us, of course, and tolerate us, and they love us individually as husbands and fathers; but instead of counting for everything, as we once did, we don’t seem to count for anything unless it be dollars and cents. It isn’t merely that you all talk so fast and have so much to say without regard to us that we often feel left out in the cold, and even hurt, but there is a stern, relentless look on some of your faces which makes us feel as though we had stolen the Holy Grail. You must have noticed it.”
“Oh, yes,” said Barbara, with a smile. “It doesn’t mean very much. Of course times are not what they were. Man used to be a demigod, now he is only a – ”
Barbara hesitated for a word, so I suggested, “Only a bank.”
“Let us say only a man. Only a man in the eyes of reflective womanhood. We have caught up and are beginning to think for ourselves. You can’t expect us to hang on your every word and to fall down and worship you without reservation as we once did. Man used to be woman’s whole existence, often to her infinite sorrow, and now he is only part of it, just as she is only a part of his. You go to your clubs; we go to ours; and while you are playing cards we read or listen to papers, some of which are not intelligible to man. But we love you still, even though we have ceased to worship you. There are a few, I admit, who would like to do away with you altogether; but they are extremists – in every revolution, you know, there are fanatics and unreasonable persons – but the vast majority of us have a tender spot for you in our hearts, and regard your case in sorrow rather than in anger – and as probably not hopeless.”
“What is the matter with us?”
“Oh, everything. You are a failure fundamentally. To begin with, your theory of life is founded on compromise. We women – the modern woman – abhor compromise.”
Although it was obvious that Barbara was trying to tease me, I realized from her expression that she intended to deal my sex a crucial stab by the word compromise. I must confess that I felt just a little uncomfortable under the white light of scorn which radiated from her eyes, while her general air reminded me for the first time disagreeably of the type of modern woman to whom I had referred.
“The world progresses by compromise,” I replied, sententiously.
“Yes, like a snail.”
“Otherwise it would stand still. A man thinks so and so; another man thinks precisely opposite; they meet each other half-way and so much is gained.”
“Oh, I know how they do. A man who stands for a principle meets another man; they argue and bluster for a few minutes, and presently they sit down and have something to eat or drink, and by the time they separate the man who stands for a principle has sacrificed all there is of it, except a tiny scrap or shred, in order not to incommode the man who has no principles at all; and what is almost worse, they part seemingly bosom friends and are apt to exchange rhetorical protestations of mutual esteem. The modern woman has no patience with such a way of doing things.”
“I suppose,” said I, “that two modern women under similar circumstances would tear each other all to pieces; there would be nothing to eat or drink, except possibly tea and wafers, and the floor would be covered with fragments of skin, hair, and clothing. When they separated one would be dead and the other maimed for life, and the principle for which the victor stood would be set back about a century and a half.”
Barbara winced a little, but she said, “What have you men accomplished all these years by your everlasting compromises? If you were really in earnest to solve the liquor problem, and the social evil, as you call it, and all the other abuses which exist in civilized and uncivilized society, you would certainly have been able to do more than you have. You have had free scope; we haven’t been consulted; we have stood aside and let you have your innings; now we merely wish to see what we can do. We shall make mistakes I dare say; even one or two of us may be torn to pieces or maimed for life; but the modern woman feels that she has the courage of her convictions and that she does not intend to let herself be thwarted or cajoled by masculine theories. That accounts largely for our apparent sniffiness. I say ‘apparent,’ because we are not really at bottom so contemptuous as we seem – even the worst of us. I suppose you are right in declaring that the proud, superior, and beautiful young person of the present day is a little disdainful. But even she is less severe than she looks. She is simply a nineteenth-century Joan of Arc protesting against the man of the world and his works, asking to be allowed to lead her life without molestation from him in a shrine of her own tasteful yet simple construction – rooms or a room where she can practise her calling, follow her tastes, ambitions, or hobbies, pursue her charities, and amuse herself without being accountable to him. She wishes him to understand that, though she is attractive, she does not mean to be seduced or to be worried into matrimony against her will, and that she intends to use her earnings and her property to pay her own bills and provide for her own gratification, instead of to defray the debts of her vicious or easy-going male relations or admirers. There is really a long back account to settle, so it is not surprising that the pendulum should swing a little too far the other way. Of course she is wrong; woman can no more live wholly independent of man than he of her – and you know what a helpless being he would be without her – and the modern woman is bound to recognize, sooner or later, that the sympathetic companionship of women with men is the only basis of true social progress. Sexual affinity is stronger than the constitutions of all the women’s clubs combined, as eight out of ten young modern women discover to their cost, or rather to their happiness, sooner or later. Some brute of a man breaks into the shrine, and before she knows it she is wheeling a baby carriage. Even the novelist, with his or her fertile invention, has failed to discover any really satisfactory ending for the independent, disdainful heroine but marriage or the grave. Spinsterhood, even when illumined by a career, is a worthy and respectable lot, but not alluring.”
It was something to be assured by my wife that the modern woman does not purpose to abolish either maternity or men, and that, so to speak, her bark is worse than her bite. Barbara belongs to a woman’s club, so she must know. We men are in such a nervous state, as a result of what Barbara calls the revolution, that very likely we are unduly sensitive and suspicious, and allow our imaginations to fly off at a tangent. Very likely, too, we are disposed to be a trifle irritable, for when one has been accustomed for long to sit on or club a person (literally or metaphorically, according to one’s social status) when she happens to express sentiments or opinions contrary to ours, it must needs take time to get used to the idea that she is really an equal, and to adjust one’s ratiocinations to suit. But even accepting as true the assurance that the forbidding air of the modern woman does not mean much, and that she loves us still though she has ceased to worship us, we have Barbara’s word for it, too, that the modern woman thinks we have made a mess of it and that man is a failure fundamentally. Love without respect! Sorrow rather than anger! It sobers one; it saddens one. For we must admit that man has had free scope and a long period in which to make the most of himself; and woman has not, which precludes us from answering back, as it were, which is always more or less of a consolation when one is brought to bay.
A tendency to compromise is certainly one of man’s characteristics. Barbara has referred to it as a salient fault – a vice, and perhaps it is, though it is writ large in the annals of civilization as conducted by man. We must at least agree that it is not woman’s way, and that she expects to do without it when we are no more or are less than we are now. Probably we have been and are too easy-going, and no one will deny that one ought at all times to have the courage of one’s convictions, even in midsummer and on purely social occasions; nevertheless it would have been trying to the nervous system and conducive to the continuance and increase of standing armies, had we favored the policy of shooting at sight those whose views on the temperance question differed from ours, or of telling the host at whose house we had passed the evening that we had been bored to death.