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Worldly Ways & Byways

by Eliot Gregory · English · Gutenberg #379 · 389,821 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Worldly Ways & Byways

Author: Eliot Gregory


        
Release date: December 1, 1995 [eBook #379]
                Most recently updated: April 5, 2007

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/379

Credits: Transcribed from the 1899 Charles Scribner's Sons edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WORLDLY WAYS & BYWAYS ***




Transcribed from the 1899 Charles Scribner's Sons edition by David Price,
email ccx074@pglaf.org





Worldly
Ways
&
Byways


BY
Eliot Gregory
("_An Idler_")

NEW YORK
_Charles Scribner's Sons_
MDCCCXCIX

_Copyright_, 1898, _by_
_Charles Scribner's Sons_

To
_E. L. Godkin, Esqre_.

SIR:

I wish your name to appear on the first page of a volume, the composition
of which was suggested by you.

Gratitude is said to be "the hope of favors to come;" these lines are
written to prove that it may be the appreciation of kindnesses received.

_Heartily yours_
_Eliot Gregory_




A Table of Contents


_To the R E A D E R_

1.  Charm

2.  The Moth and the Star

3.  Contrasted Travelling

4.  The Outer and the Inner Woman

5.  On Some Gilded Misalliances

6.  The Complacency of Mediocrity

7.  The Discontent of Talent

8.  Slouch

9.  Social Suggestion

10. Bohemia

11. Social Exiles

12. "Seven Ages" of Furniture

13. Our Elite and Public Life

14. The Small Summer Hotel

15. A False Start

16. A Holy Land

17. Royalty at Play

18. A Rock Ahead

19. The Grand Prix

20. "The Treadmill"

21. "Like Master Like Man"

22. An English Invasion of the Riviera

23. A Common Weakness

24. Changing Paris

25. Contentment

26. The Climber

27. The Last of the Dandies

28. A Nation on the Wing

29. Husks

30. The Faubourg St. Germain

31. Men's Manners

32. An Ideal Hostess

33. The Introducer

34. A Question and an Answer

35. Living on Your Friends

36. American Society in Italy

37. The Newport of the Past

38. A Conquest of Europe

39. A Race of Slaves

40. Introspection




To the Reader


There existed formerly, in diplomatic circles, a curious custom, since
fallen into disuse, entitled the Pele Mele, contrived doubtless by some
distracted Master of Ceremonies to quell the endless jealousies and
quarrels for precedence between courtiers and diplomatists of contending
pretensions.  Under this rule no rank was recognized, each person being
allowed at banquet, fete, or other public ceremony only such place as he
had been ingenious or fortunate enough to obtain.

Any one wishing to form an idea of the confusion that ensued, of the
intrigues and expedients resorted to, not only in procuring prominent
places, but also in ensuring the integrity of the Pele Mele, should
glance over the amusing memoirs of M. de Segur.

The aspiring nobles and ambassadors, harassed by this constant
preoccupation, had little time or inclination left for any serious
pursuit, since, to take a moment's repose or an hour's breathing space
was to risk falling behind in the endless and aimless race.  Strange as
it may appear, the knowledge that they owed place and preferment more to
chance or intrigue than to any personal merit or inherited right, instead
of lessening the value of the prizes for which all were striving, seemed
only to enhance them in the eyes of the competitors.

Success was the unique standard by which they gauged their fellows.  Those
who succeeded revelled in the adulation of their friends, but when any
one failed, the fickle crowd passed him by to bow at more fortunate feet.

No better picture could be found of the "world" of to-day, a perpetual
Pele Mele, where such advantages only are conceded as we have been
sufficiently enterprising to obtain, and are strong or clever enough to
keep--a constant competition, a daily steeplechase, favorable to daring
spirits and personal initiative but with the defect of keeping frail
humanity ever on the qui vive.

Philosophers tell us, that we should seek happiness only in the calm of
our own minds, not allowing external conditions or the opinions of others
to influence our ways.  This lofty detachment from environment is
achieved by very few.  Indeed, the philosophers themselves (who may be
said to have invented the art of "posing") were generally as vain as
peacocks, profoundly pre-occupied with the verdict of their
contemporaries and their position as regards posterity.

Man is born gregarious and remains all his life a herding animal.  As one
keen observer has written, "So great is man's horror of being alone that
he will seek the society of those he neither likes nor respects sooner
than be left to his own."  The laws and conventions that govern men's
intercourse have, therefore, formed a tempting subject for the writers of
all ages.  Some have labored hoping to reform their generation, others
have written to offer solutions for life's many problems.

Beaumarchais, whose penetrating wit left few subjects untouched, makes
his Figaro put the subject aside with "Je me presse de rire de tout, de
peur d'etre oblige d'en pleurer."

The author of this little volume pretends to settle no disputes, aims at
inaugurating no reforms.  He has lightly touched on passing topics and
jotted down, "to point a moral or adorn a tale," some of the more obvious
foibles and inconsistencies of our American ways.  If a stray bit of
philosophy has here and there slipped in between the lines, it is mostly
of the laughing "school," and used more in banter than in blame.

This much abused "world" is a fairly agreeable place if you do not take
it seriously.  Meet it with a friendly face and it will smile gayly back
at you, but do not ask of it what it cannot give, or attribute to its
verdicts more importance than they deserve.

ELIOT GREGORY

_Newport_, _November first_, 1897




No. 1--Charm


Women endowed by nature with the indescribable quality we call "charm"
(for want of a better word), are the supreme development of a perfected
race, the last word, as it were, of civilization; the flower of their
kind, crowning centuries of growing refinement and cultivation.  Other
women may unite a thousand brilliant qualities, and attractive
attributes, may be beautiful as Astarte or witty as Madame de Montespan,
those endowed with the power of charm, have in all ages and under every
sky, held undisputed rule over the hearts of their generation.

When we look at the portraits of the enchantresses whom history tells us
have ruled the world by their charm, and swayed the destinies of empires
at their fancy, we are astonished to find that they have rarely been
beautiful.  From Cleopatra or Mary of Scotland down to Lola Montez, the
tell-tale coin or canvas reveals the same marvellous fact.  We wonder how
these women attained such influence over the men of their day, their
husbands or lovers.  We would do better to look around us, or inward, and
observe what is passing in our own hearts.

Pause, reader mine, a moment and reflect.  Who has held the first place
in your thoughts, filled your soul, and influenced your life?  Was she
the most beautiful of your acquaintances, the radiant vision that dazzled
your boyish eyes?  Has she not rather been some gentle, quiet woman whom
you hardly noticed the first time your paths crossed, but who gradually
grew to be a part of your life--to whom you instinctively turned for
consolation in moments of discouragement, for counsel in your
difficulties, and whose welcome was the bright moment in your day, looked
forward to through long hours of toil and worry?

In the hurly-burly of life we lose sight of so many things our fathers
and mothers clung to, and have drifted so far away from their gentle
customs and simple, home-loving habits, that one wonders what impression
our society would make on a woman of a century ago, could she by some
spell be dropped into the swing of modern days.  The good soul would be
apt to find it rather a far cry from the quiet pleasures of her youth, to
"a ladies' amateur bicycle race" that formed the attraction recently at a
summer resort.

That we should have come to think it natural and proper for a young wife
and mother to pass her mornings at golf, lunching at the club-house to
"save time," returning home only for a hurried change of toilet to start
again on a bicycle or for a round of calls, an occupation that will leave
her just the half-hour necessary to slip into a dinner gown, and then for
her to pass the evening in dancing or at the card-table, shows, when one
takes the time to think of it, how unconsciously we have changed, and
(with all apologies to the gay hostesses and graceful athletes of to-day)
not for the better.

It is just in the subtle quality of charm that the women of the last ten
years have fallen away from their elder sisters.  They have been carried
along by a love of sport, and by the set of fashion's tide, not stopping
to ask themselves whither they are floating.  They do not realize all the
importance of their acts nor the true meaning of their metamorphosis.

The dear creatures should be content, for they have at last escaped from
the bondage of ages, have broken their chains, and vaulted over their
prison walls.  "Lords and masters" have gradually become very humble and
obedient servants, and the "love, honour, and obey" of the marriage
service might now more logically be spoken by the man; on the lips of the
women of to-day it is but a graceful "_facon de parler_," and holds only
those who choose to be bound.

It is not my intention to rail against the short-comings of the day.  That
ungrateful task I leave to sterner moralists, and hopeful souls who
naively imagine they can stem the current of an epoch with the barrier of
their eloquence, or sweep back an ocean of innovations by their logic.  I
should like, however, to ask my sisters one question: Are they quite sure
that women gain by these changes?  Do they imagine, these "sporty" young
females in short-cut skirts and mannish shirts and ties, that it is
seductive to a lover, or a husband to see his idol in a violent
perspiration, her draggled hair blowing across a sunburned face, panting
up a long hill in front of him on a bicycle, frantic at having lost her
race?  Shade of gentle William! who said

   _A woman moved_, _is like a fountain troubled_,--
   _Muddy_, _ill-seeming_, _thick_, _bereft of beauty_.
   _And while it is so_, _none so dry or thirsty_
   _Will deign to sip or touch one drop of it_.

Is the modern girl under the impression that men will be contented with
poor imitations of themselves, to share their homes and be the mothers of
their children?  She is throwing away the substance for the shadow!

The moment women step out from the sanctuary of their homes, the glamour
that girlhood or maternity has thrown around them cast aside, that moment
will they cease to rule mankind.  Women may agitate until they have
obtained political recognition, but will awake from their foolish dream
of power, realizing too late what they have sacrificed to obtain it, that
the price has been very heavy, and the fruit of their struggles bitter on
their lips.

There are few men, I imagine, of my generation to whom the words "home"
and "mother" have not a penetrating charm, who do not look back with
softened heart and tender thoughts to fireside scenes of evening readings
and twilight talks at a mother's knee, realizing that the best in their
natures owes its growth to these influences.

I sometimes look about me and wonder what the word "mother" will mean
later, to modern little boys.  It will evoke, I fear, a confused
remembrance of some centaur-like being, half woman, half wheel, or as it
did to neglected little Rawdon Crawley, the vision of a radiant creature
in gauze and jewels, driving away to endless _fetes_--_fetes_ followed by
long mornings, when he was told not to make any noise, or play too
loudly, "as poor mamma is resting."  What other memories can the
"successful" woman of to-day hope to leave in the minds of her children?
If the child remembers his mother in this way, will not the man who has
known and perhaps loved her, feel the same sensation of empty futility
when her name is mentioned?

The woman who proposes a game of cards to a youth who comes to pass an
hour in her society, can hardly expect him to carry away a particularly
tender memory of her as he leaves the house.  The girl who has rowed,
ridden, or raced at a man's side for days, with the object of getting the
better of him at some sport or pastime, cannot reasonably hope to be
connected in his thoughts with ideas more tender or more elevated than
"odds" or "handicaps," with an undercurrent of pique if his unsexed
companion has "downed" him successfully.

What man, unless he be singularly dissolute or unfortunate, but turns his
steps, when he can, towards some dainty parlor where he is sure of
finding a smiling, soft-voiced woman, whose welcome he knows will soothe
his irritated nerves and restore the even balance of his temper, whose
charm will work its subtle way into his troubled spirit?  The wife he
loves, or the friend he admires and respects, will do more for him in one
such quiet hour when two minds commune, coming closer to the real man,
and moving him to braver efforts, and nobler aims, than all the beauties
and "sporty" acquaintances of a lifetime.  No matter what a man's
education or taste is, none are insensible to such an atmosphere or to
the grace and witchery a woman can lend to the simplest surroundings.  She
need not be beautiful or brilliant to hold him in lifelong allegiance, if
she but possess this magnetism.

Madame Recamier was a beautiful, but not a brilliant woman, yet she held
men her slaves for years.  To know her was to fall under her charm, and
to feel it once was to remain her adorer for life.  She will go down to
history as the type of a fascinating woman.  Being asked once by an
acquaintance what spell she worked on mankind that enabled her to hold
them for ever at her feet, she laughingly answered:

"I have always found two words sufficient.  When a visitor comes into my
salon, I say, '_Enfin_!' and when he gets up to go away, I say,
'_Deja_!'"

"What is this wonderful 'charm' he is writing about?"  I hear some
sprightly maiden inquire as she reads these lines.  My dear young lady,
if you ask the question, you have judged yourself and been found wanting.
But to satisfy you as far as I can, I will try and define it--not by
telling you what it is; that is beyond my power--but by negatives, the
only way in which subtle subjects can be approached.

A woman of charm is never flustered and never _distraite_.  She talks
little, and rarely of herself, remembering that bores are persons who
insist on talking about themselves.  She does not break the thread of a
conversation by irrelevant questions or confabulate in an undertone with
the servants.  No one of her guests receives more of her attention than
another and none are neglected.  She offers to each one who speaks the
homage of her entire attention.  She never makes an effort to be
brilliant or entertain with her wit.  She is far too clever for that.
Neither does she volunteer information nor converse about her troubles or
her ailments, nor wander off into details about people you do not know.

She is all things--to each man she likes, in the best sense of that
phrase, appreciating his qualities, stimulating him to better things.

   --_for his gayer hours_
   _She has a voice of gladness and a smile and eloquence of beauty_;
   _and she glides_
   _Into his darker musings with a mild and healing sympathy that steals
   away_
   _Their sharpness ere he is aware_.




No. 2--The Moth and the Star


The truth of the saying that "it is always the unexpected that happens,"
receives in this country a confirmation from an unlooked-for quarter, as
does the fact of human nature being always, discouragingly, the same in
spite of varied surroundings.  This sounds like a paradox, but is an
exceedingly simple statement easily proved.

That the great mass of Americans, drawn as they are from such varied
sources, should take any interest in the comings and goings or social
doings of a small set of wealthy and fashionable people, is certainly an
unexpected development.  That to read of the amusements and home life of
a clique of people with whom they have little in common, whose whole
education and point of view are different from their own, and whom they
have rarely seen and never expect to meet, should afford the average
citizen any amusement seems little short of impossible.

One accepts as a natural sequence that abroad (where an hereditary
nobility have ruled for centuries, and accustomed the people to look up
to them as the visible embodiment of all that is splendid and
unattainable in life) such interest should exist.  That the home-coming
of an English or French nobleman to his estates should excite the
enthusiasm of hundreds more or less dependent upon him for their
amusement or more material advantages; that his marriage to an
heiress--meaning to them the re-opening of a long-closed _chateau_ and
the beginning of a period of prosperity for the district--should excite
his neighbors is not to be wondered at.

It is well known that whole regions have been made prosperous by the
residence of a court, witness the wealth and trade brought into Scotland
by the Queen's preference for "the Land of Cakes," and the discontent and
poverty in Ireland from absenteeism and persistent avoidance of that
country by the court.  But in this land, where every reason for
interesting one class in another seems lacking, that thousands of well-to-
do people (half the time not born in this hemisphere), should delightedly
devour columns of incorrect information about New York dances and Lenox
house-parties, winter cruises, or Newport coaching parades, strikes the
observer as the "unexpected" in its purest form.

That this interest exists is absolutely certain.  During a trip in the
West, some seasons ago, I was dumbfounded to find that the members of a
certain New York set were familiarly spoken of by their first names, and
was assailed with all sorts of eager questions when it was discovered
that I knew them.  A certain young lady, at that time a belle in New
York, was currently called _Sally_, and a well-known sportsman _Fred_, by
thousands of people who had never seen either of them.  It seems
impossible, does it not?  Let us look a little closer into the reason of
this interest, and we shall find how simple is the apparent paradox.

Perhaps in no country, in all the world, do the immense middle classes
lead such uninteresting lives, and have such limited resources at their
disposal for amusement or the passing of leisure hours.

Abroad the military bands play constantly in the public parks; the
museums and palaces are always open wherein to pass rainy Sunday
afternoons; every village has its religious _fetes_ and local fair,
attended with dancing and games.  All these mental relaxations are
lacking in our newer civilization; life is stripped of everything that is
not distinctly practical; the dull round of weekly toil is only broken by
the duller idleness of an American Sunday.  Naturally, these people long
for something outside of themselves and their narrow sphere.

Suddenly there arises a class whose wealth permits them to break through
the iron circle of work and boredom, who do picturesque and delightful
things, which appeal directly to the imagination; they build a summer
residence complete, in six weeks, with furniture and bric-a-brac, on the
top of a roadless mountain; they sail in fairylike yachts to summer seas,
and marry their daughters to the heirs of ducal houses; they float up the
Nile in dahabeeyah, or pass the "month of flowers" in far Japan.

It is but human nature to delight in reading of these things.  Here the
great mass of the people find (and eagerly seize on), the element of
romance lacking in their lives, infinitely more enthralling than the
doings of any novel's heroine.  It is real!  It is taking place!
and--still deeper reason--in every ambitious American heart lingers the
secret hope that with luck and good management they too may do those very
things, or at least that their children will enjoy the fortunes they have
gained, in just those ways.  The gloom of the monotonous present is
brightened, the patient toiler returns to his desk with something
definite before him--an objective point--towards which he can struggle;
he knows that this is no impossible dream.  Dozens have succeeded and
prove to him what energy and enterprise can accomplish.

Do not laugh at this suggestion; it is far truer than you imagine.  Many
a weary woman has turned from such reading to her narrow duties, feeling
that life is not all work, and with renewed hope in the possibilities of
the future.

Doubtless a certain amount of purely idle curiosity is mingled with the
other feelings.  I remember quite well showing our city sights to a bored
party of Western friends, and failing entirely to amuse them, when,
happening to mention as we drove up town, "there goes Mr. Blank," (naming
a prominent leader of cotillions), my guests nearly fell over each other
and out of the carriage in their eagerness to see the gentleman of whom
they had read so much, and who was, in those days, a power in his way,
and several times after they expressed the greatest satisfaction at
having seen him.

I have found, with rare exceptions, and the experience has been rather
widely gathered all over the country, that this interest--or call it what
you will--has been entirely without spite or bitterness, rather the
delight of a child in a fairy story.  For people are rarely envious of
things far removed from their grasp.  You will find that a woman who is
bitter because her neighbor has a girl "help" or a more comfortable
cottage, rarely feels envy towards the owners of opera-boxes or yachts.
Such heart-burnings (let us hope they are few) are among a class born in
the shadow of great wealth, and bred up with tastes that they can neither
relinquish nor satisfy.  The large majority of people show only a good-
natured inclination to chaff, none of the "class feeling" which certain
papers and certain politicians try to excite.  Outside of the large
cities with their foreign-bred, semi-anarchistic populations, the tone is
perfectly friendly; for the simple reason that it never entered into the
head of any American to imagine that there _was_ any class difference.  To
him his rich neighbors are simply his lucky neighbors, almost his
relations, who, starting from a common stock, have been able to "get
there" sooner than he has done.  So he wishes them luck on the voyage in
which he expects to join them as soon as he has had time to make a
fortune.

So long as the world exists, or at least until we have reformed it and
adopted Mr. Bellamy's delightful scheme of existence as described in
"Looking Backward," great fortunes will be made, and painful contrasts be
seen, especially in cities, and it would seem to be the duty of the press
to soften--certainly not to sharpen--the edge of discontent.  As long as
human nature is human nature, and the poor care to read of the doings of
the more fortunate, by all means give them the reading they enjoy and
demand, but let it be written in a kindly spirit so that it may be a
cultivation as well as a recreation.  Treat this perfectly natural and
honest taste honestly and naturally, for, after all, it is

   _The desire of the moth for the star_,
   _Of the night for the morrow_.
   _The devotion to something afar_
   _From the sphere of our sorrow_.




No. 3--Contrasted Travelling


When our parents went to Europe fifty years ago, it was the event of a
lifetime--a tour lovingly mapped out in advance with advice from
travelled friends.  Passports were procured, books read, wills made, and
finally, prayers were offered up in church and solemn leave-taking
performed.  Once on the other side, descriptive letters were
conscientiously written, and eagerly read by friends at home,--in spite
of these epistles being on the thinnest of paper and with crossing
carried to a fine art, for postage was high in the forties.  Above all, a
journal was kept.

Such a journal lies before me as I write.  Four little volumes in worn
morocco covers and faded "Italian" writing, more precious than all my
other books combined, their sight recalls that lost time--my youth--when,
as a reward, they were unlocked that I might look at the drawings, and
the sweetest voice in the world would read to me from them!  Happy,
vanished days, that are so far away they seem to have been in another
existence!

The first volume opens with the voyage across the Atlantic, made in an
American clipper (a model unsurpassed the world over), which was
accomplished in thirteen days, a feat rarely equalled now, by sail.
Genial Captain Nye was in command.  The same who later, when a steam
propelled vessel was offered him, refused, as unworthy of a seaman, "to
boil a kettle across the ocean."

Life friendships were made in those little cabins, under the swinging
lamp the travellers re-read last volumes so as to be prepared to
appreciate everything on landing.  Ireland, England and Scotland were
visited with an enthusiasm born of Scott, the tedium of long coaching
journeys being beguiled by the first "numbers" of "Pickwick," over which
the men of the party roared, but which the ladies did not care for,
thinking it vulgar, and not to be compared to "Waverley," "Thaddeus of
Warsaw," or "The Mysteries of Udolpho."

A circular letter to our diplomatic agents abroad was presented in each
city, a rite invariably followed by an invitation to dine, for which
occasions a black satin frock with a low body and a few simple ornaments,
including (supreme elegance) a diamond cross, were carried in the trunks.
In London a travelling carriage was bought and stocked, the indispensable
courier engaged, half guide, half servant, who was expected to explore a
city, or wait at table, as occasion required.  Four days were passed
between Havre and Paris, and the slow progress across Europe was
accomplished, Murray in one hand and Byron in the other.

One page used particularly to attract my boyish attention.  It was headed
by a naive little drawing of the carriage at an Italian inn door, and
described how, after the dangers and discomforts of an Alpine pass, they
descended by sunny slopes into Lombardy.  Oh! the rapture that breathes
from those simple pages!  The vintage scenes, the mid-day halt for
luncheon eaten in the open air, the afternoon start, the front seat of
the carriage heaped with purple grapes, used to fire my youthful
imagination and now recalls Madame de Stael's line on perfect happiness:
"To be young! to be in love! to be in Italy!"

Do people enjoy Europe as much now?  I doubt it!  It has become too much
a matter of course, a necessary part of the routine of life.  Much of the
bloom is brushed from foreign scenes by descriptive books and
photographs, that St. Mark's or Mt. Blanc has become as familiar to a
child's eye as the house he lives in, and in consequence the reality now
instead of being a revelation is often a disappointment.

In my youth, it was still an event to cross.  I remember my first voyage
on the old side-wheeled _Scotia_, and Captain Judkins in a wheeled chair,
and a perpetual bad temper, being pushed about the deck; and our delight,
when the inevitable female asking him (three days out) how far we were
from land, got the answer "about a mile!"

"Indeed!  How interesting!  In which direction?"

"In that direction, madam," shouted the captain, pointing downward as he
turned his back to her.

If I remember, we were then thirteen days getting to Liverpool, and made
the acquaintance on board of the people with whom we travelled during
most of that winter.  Imagine anyone now making an acquaintance on board
a steamer!  In those simple days people depended on the friendships made
at summer hotels or boarding-houses for their visiting list.  At present,
when a girl comes out, her mother presents her to everybody she will be
likely to know if she were to live a century.  In the seventies, ladies
cheerfully shared their state-rooms with women they did not know, and
often became friends in consequence; but now, unless a certain deck-suite
can be secured, with bath and sitting-room, on one or two particular
"steamers," the great lady is in despair.  Yet our mothers were quite as
refined as the present generation, only they took life simply, as they
found it.

Children are now taken abroad so young, that before they have reached an
age to appreciate what they see, Europe has become to them a twice-told
tale.  So true is this, that a receipt for making children good Americans
is to bring them up abroad.  Once they get back here it is hard to entice
them away again.

With each improvement in the speed of our steamers, something of the
glamour of Europe vanishes.  The crowds that yearly rush across see and
appreciate less in a lifetime than our parents did in their one tour
abroad.  A good lady of my acquaintance was complaining recently how much
Paris bored her.

"What can you do to pass the time?" she asked.  I innocently answered
that I knew nothing so entrancing as long mornings passed at the Louvre.

"Oh, yes, I do that too," she replied, "but I like the 'Bon Marche'
best!"

A trip abroad has become a purely social function to a large number of
wealthy Americans, including "presentation" in London and a winter in
Rome or Cairo.  And just as a "smart" Englishman is sure to tell you that
he has never visited the "Tower," it has become good form to ignore the
sight-seeing side of Europe; hundreds of New Yorkers never seeing
anything of Paris beyond the Rue de la Paix and the Bois.  They would as
soon think of going to Cluny or St. Denis as of visiting the museum in
our park!

Such people go to Fontainebleau because they are buying furniture, and
they wish to see the best models.  They go to Versailles on the coach and
"do" the Palace during the half-hour before luncheon.  Beyond that,
enthusiasm rarely carries them.  As soon as they have settled themselves
at the Bristol or the Rhin begins the endless treadmill of leaving cards
on all the people just seen at home, and whom they will meet again in a
couple of months at Newport or Bar Harbor.  This duty and the
all-entrancing occupation of getting clothes fills up every spare hour.
Indeed, clothes seem to pervade the air of Paris in May, the conversation
rarely deviating from them.  If you meet a lady you know looking ill, and
ask the cause, it generally turns out to be "four hours a day standing to
be fitted."  Incredible as it may seem, I have been told of one plain
maiden lady, who makes a trip across, spring and autumn, with the sole
object of getting her two yearly outfits.

Remembering the hundreds of cultivated people whose dream in life (often
unrealized from lack of means) has been to go abroad and visit the scenes
their reading has made familiar, and knowing what such a trip would mean
to them, and how it would be looked back upon during the rest of an
obscure life, I felt it almost a duty to "suppress" a wealthy female
(doubtless an American cousin of Lady Midas) when she informed me, the
other day, that decidedly she would not go abroad this spring.

"It is not necessary.  Worth has my measures!"




No. 4--The Outer and the Inner Woman


It is a sad commentary on our boasted civilization that cases of
shoplifting occur more and more frequently each year, in which the
delinquents are women of education and refinement, or at least belong to
families and occupy positions in which one would expect to find those
qualities!  The reason, however, is not difficult to discover.

In the wake of our hasty and immature prosperity has come (as it does to
all suddenly enriched societies) a love of ostentation, a desire to
dazzle the crowd by displays of luxury and rich trappings indicative of
crude and vulgar standards.  The newly acquired money, instead of being
expended for solid comforts or articles which would afford lasting
satisfaction, is lavished on what can be worn in public, or the outer
shell of display, while the home table and fireside belongings are
neglected.  A glance around our theatres, or at the men and women in our
crowded thoroughfares, is sufficient to reveal to even a casual observer
that the mania for fine clothes and what is costly, _per se_, has become
the besetting sin of our day and our land.

The tone of most of the papers and of our theatrical advertisements
reflects this feeling.  The amount of money expended for a work of art or
a new building is mentioned before any comment as to its beauty or
fitness.  A play is spoken of as "Manager So and So's thirty-thousand-
dollar production!"  The fact that a favorite actress will appear in four
different dresses during the three acts of a comedy, each toilet being a
special creation designed for her by a leading Parisian house, is
considered of supreme importance and is dwelt upon in the programme as a
special attraction.

It would be astonishing if the taste of our women were different,
considering the way clothes are eternally being dangled before their
eyes.  Leading papers publish illustrated supplements devoted exclusively
to the subject of attire, thus carrying temptation into every humble
home, and suggesting unattainable luxuries.  Windows in many of the
larger shops contain life-sized manikins loaded with the latest costly
and ephemeral caprices of fashion arranged to catch the eye of the poorer
class of women, who stand in hundreds gazing at the display like larks
attracted by a mirror!  Watch those women as they turn away, and listen
to their sighs of discontent and envy.  Do they not tell volumes about
petty hopes and ambitions?

I do not refer to the wealthy women whose toilets are in keeping with
their incomes and the general footing of their households; that they
should spend more or less in fitting themselves out daintily is of little
importance.  The point where this subject becomes painful is in families
of small means where young girls imagine that to be elaborately dressed
is the first essential of existence, and, in consequence, bend their
labors and their intelligence towards this end.  Last spring I asked an
old friend where she and her daughters intended passing their summer.  Her
answer struck me as being characteristic enough to quote: "We should much
prefer," she said, "returning to Bar Harbor, for we all enjoy that place
and have many friends there.  But the truth is, my daughters have bought
themselves very little in the way of toilet this year, as our finances
are not in a flourishing condition.  So my poor girls will be obliged to
make their last year's dresses do for another season.  Under these
circumstances, it is out of the question for us to return a second summer
to the same place."

I do not know how this anecdote strikes my readers.  It made me
thoughtful and sad to think that, in a family of intelligent and
practical women, such a reason should be considered sufficient to
outweigh enjoyment, social relations, even health, and allowed to change
the plans of an entire family.

As American women are so fond of copying English ways they should be
willing to take a few lessons on the subject of raiment from across the
water.  As this is not intended to be a dissertation on "How to Dress
Well on Nothing a Year," and as I feel the greatest diffidence in
approaching a subject of which I know absolutely nothing, it will be
better to sheer off from these reefs and quicksands.  Every one who reads
these lines will know perfectly well what is meant, when reference is
made to the good sense and practical utility of English women's dress.

What disgusts and angers me (when my way takes me into our surface or
elevated cars or into ferry boats and local trains) is the utter
dissonance between the outfit of most of the women I meet and their
position and occupation.  So universal is this, that it might almost be
laid down as an axiom, that the American woman, no matter in what walk of
life you observe her, or what the time or the place, is always
persistently and grotesquely overdressed.  From the women who frequent
the hotels of our summer or winter resorts, down all the steps of the
social staircase to the char-woman, who consents (spasmodically) to
remove the dust and waste-papers from my office, there seems to be the
same complete disregard of fitness.  The other evening, in leaving my
rooms, I brushed against a portly person in the half-light of the
corridor.  There was a shimmer of (what appeared to my inexperienced eyes
as) costly stuffs, a huge hat crowned the shadow itself, "topped by
nodding plumes," which seemed to account for the depleted condition of my
feather duster.

I found on inquiring of the janitor, that the dressy person I had met,
was the char-woman in street attire, and that a closet was set aside in
the building, for the special purpose of her morning and evening
transformations, which she underwent in the belief that her social
position in Avenue A would suffer, should she appear in the streets
wearing anything less costly than seal-skin and velvet or such imitations
of those expensive materials as her stipend would permit.

I have as tenants of a small wooden house in Jersey City, a bank clerk,
his wife and their three daughters.  He earns in the neighborhood of
fifteen hundred dollars a year.  Their rent (with which, by the way, they
are always in arrears) is three hundred dollars.  I am favored spring and
autumn by a visit from the ladies of that family, in the hope (generally
futile) of inducing me to do some ornamental papering or painting in
their residence, subjects on which they have by experience found my agent
to be unapproachable.  When those four women descend upon me, I am fairly
dazzled by the splendor of their attire, and lost in wonder as to how the
price of all that finery can have been squeezed out of the twelve
remaining hundreds of their income.  When I meet the father he is shabby
to the outer limits of the genteel.  His hat has, I am sure, supported
the suns and snowstorms of a dozen seasons.  There is a threadbare shine
on his apparel that suggests a heartache in each whitened seam, but the
ladies are mirrors of fashion, as well as moulds of form.  What can
remain for any creature comforts after all those fine clothes have been
paid for?  And how much is put away for the years when the long-suffering
money maker will be past work, or saved towards the time when sickness or
accident shall appear on the horizon?  How those ladies had the "nerve"
to enter a ferry boat or crowd into a cable car, dressed as they were,
has always been a marvel to me.  A landau and two liveried servants would
barely have been in keeping with their appearance.

Not long ago, a great English nobleman, who is also famous in the
yachting world, visited this country accompanied by his two daughters,
high-bred and genial ladies.  No self-respecting American shop girl or
fashionable typewriter would have condescended to appear in the
inexpensive attire which those English women wore.  Wherever one met
them, at dinner, _fete_, or ball, they were always the most simply
dressed women in the room.  I wonder if it ever occurred to any of their
gorgeously attired hostesses, that it was because their transatlantic
guests were so sure of their position, that they contented themselves
with such simple toilets knowing that nothing they might wear could
either improve or alter their standing.

In former ages, sumptuary laws were enacted by parental governments, in
the hope of suppressing extravagance in dress, the state of affairs we
deplore now, not being a new development of human weakness, but as old as
wealth.

The desire to shine by the splendor of one's trappings is the first idea
of the parvenu, especially here in this country, where the ambitious are
denied the pleasure of acquiring a title, and where official rank carries
with it so little social weight.  Few more striking ways present
themselves to the crude and half-educated for the expenditure of a new
fortune than the purchase of sumptuous apparel, the satisfaction being
immediate and material.  The wearer of a complete and perfect toilet must
experience a delight of which the uninitiated know nothing, for such
cruel sacrifices are made and so many privations endured to procure this
satisfaction.  When I see groups of women, clad in the latest designs of
purple and fine linen, stand shivering on street corners of a winter
night, until they can crowd into a car, I doubt if the joy they get from
their clothes, compensates them for the creature comforts they are forced
to forego, and I wonder if it never occurs to them to spend less on their
wardrobes and so feel they can afford to return from a theatre or concert
comfortably, in a cab, as a foreign woman, with their income would do.

There is a stoical determination about the American point of view that
compels a certain amount of respect.  Our countrywomen will deny
themselves pleasures, will economize on their food and will remain in
town during the summer, but when walking abroad they must be clad in the
best, so that no one may know by their appearance if the income be
counted by hundreds or thousands.

While these standards prevail and the female mind is fixed on this
subject with such dire intent, it is not astonishing that a weaker sister
is occasionally tempted beyond her powers of resistance.  Nor that each
day a new case of a well-dressed woman thieving in a shop reaches our
ears.  The poor feeble-minded creature is not to blame.  She is but the
reflexion of the minds around her and is probably like the lady Emerson
tells of, who confessed to him "that the sense of being perfectly well-
dressed had given her a feeling of inward tranquillity which religion was
powerless to bestow."




No. 5--On Some Gilded Misalliances


A dear old American lady, who lived the greater part of her life in Rome,
and received every body worth knowing in her spacious drawing-rooms, far
up in the dim vastnesses of a Roman palace, used to say that she had only
known one really happy marriage made by an American girl abroad.

In those days, being young and innocent, I considered that remark
cynical, and in my heart thought nothing could be more romantic and
charming than for a fair compatriot to assume an historic title and
retire to her husband's estates, and rule smilingly over him and a
devoted tenantry, as in the last act of a comic opera, when a
rose-colored light is burning and the orchestra plays the last brilliant
chords of a wedding march.

There seemed to my perverted sense a certain poetic justice about the
fact that money, gained honestly but prosaically, in groceries or gas,
should go to regild an ancient blazon or prop up the crumbling walls of
some stately palace abroad.

Many thoughtful years and many cruel realities have taught me that my
gracious hostess of the "seventies" was right, and that marriage under
these conditions is apt to be much more like the comic opera after the
curtain has been rung down, when the lights are out, the applauding
public gone home, and the weary actors brought slowly back to the present
and the positive, are wondering how they are to pay their rent or dodge
the warrant in ambush around the corner.

International marriages usually come about from a deficient knowledge of
the world.  The father becomes rich, the family travel abroad, some
mutual friend (often from purely interested motives) produces a suitor
for the hand of the daughter, in the shape of a "prince" with a title
that makes the whole simple American family quiver with delight.

After a few visits the suitor declares himself; the girl is flattered,
the father loses his head, seeing visions of his loved daughter
hob-nobbing with royalty, and (intoxicating thought!) snubbing the
"swells" at home who had shown reluctance to recognize him and his
family.

It is next to impossible for him to get any reliable information about
his future son-in-law in a country where, as an American, he has few
social relations, belongs to no club, and whose idiom is a sealed book to
him.  Every circumstance conspires to keep the flaws on the article for
sale out of sight and place the suitor in an advantageous light.  Several
weeks' "courting" follows, paterfamilias agrees to part with a handsome
share of his earnings, and a marriage is "arranged."

In the case where the girl has retained some of her self-respect the
suitor is made to come to her country for the ceremony.  And, that the
contrast between European ways and our simple habits may not be too
striking, an establishment is hastily got together, with hired liveries
and new-bought carriages, as in a recent case in this state.  The
sensational papers write up this "international union," and publish
"faked" portraits of the bride and her noble spouse.  The sovereign of
the groom's country (enchanted that some more American money is to be
imported into his land) sends an economical present and an autograph
letter.  The act ends.  Limelight and slow music!

In a few years rumors of dissent and trouble float vaguely back to the
girl's family.  Finally, either a great scandal occurs, and there is one
dishonored home the more in the world, or an expatriated woman, thousands
of miles from the friends and relatives who might be of some comfort to
her, makes up her mind to accept "anything" for the sake of her children,
and attempts to build up some sort of an existence out of the remains of
her lost illusions, and the father wakes up from his dream to realize
that his wealth has only served to ruin what he loved best in all the
world.

Sometimes the conditions are delightfully comic, as in a well-known case,
where the daughter, who married into an indolent, happy-go-lucky Italian
family, had inherited her father's business push and energy along with
his fortune, and immediately set about "running" her husband's estate as
she had seen her father do his bank.  She tried to revive a
half-forgotten industry in the district, scraped and whitewashed their
picturesque old villa, proposed her husband's entering business, and in
short dashed head down against all his inherited traditions and national
prejudices, until her new family loathed the sight of the brisk American
face, and the poor she had tried to help, sulked in their newly drained
houses and refused to be comforted.  Her ways were not Italian ways, and
she seemed to the nun-like Italian ladies, almost unsexed, as she tramped
about the fields, talking artificial manure and subsoil drainage with the
men.  Yet neither she nor her husband was to blame.  The young Italian
had but followed the teachings of his family, which decreed that the only
honorable way for an aristocrat to acquire wealth was to marry it.  The
American wife honestly tried to do her duty in this new position, naively
thinking she could engraft transatlantic "go" upon the indolent Italian
character.  Her work was in vain; she made herself and her husband so
unpopular that they are now living in this country, regretting too late
the error of their ways.

Another case but little less laughable, is that of a Boston girl with a
neat little fortune of her own, who, when married to the young Viennese
of her choice, found that he expected her to live with his family on the
third floor of their "palace" (the two lower floors being rented to
foreigners), and as there was hardly enough money for a box at the opera,
she was not expected to go, whereas his position made it necessary for
him to have a stall and appear there nightly among the men of his rank,
the astonished and disillusioned Bostonian remaining at home _en tete-a-
tete_ with the women of his family, who seemed to think this the most
natural arrangement in the world.

It certainly is astonishing that we, the most patriotic of nations, with
such high opinion of ourselves and our institutions, should be so ready
to hand over our daughters and our ducats to the first foreigner who asks
for them, often requiring less information about him than we should
consider necessary before buying a horse or a dog.

Women of no other nation have this mania for espousing aliens.  Nowhere
else would a girl with a large fortune dream of marrying out of her
country.  Her highest ideal of a husband would be a man of her own kin.
It is the rarest thing in the world to find a well-born French, Spanish,
or Italian woman married to a foreigner and living away from her country.
How can a woman expect to be happy separated from all the ties and
traditions of her youth?  If she is taken abroad young, she may still
hope to replace her friends as is often done.  But the real reason of
unhappiness (greater and deeper than this) lies in the fundamental
difference of the whole social structure between our country and that of
her adoption, and the radically different way of looking at every side of
life.

Surely a girl must feel that a man who allows a marriage to be arranged
for him (and only signs the contact because its pecuniary clauses are to
his satisfaction, and who would withdraw in a moment if these were
suppressed), must have an entirely different point of view from her own
on all the vital issues of life.

Foreigners undoubtedly make excellent husbands for their own women.  But
they are, except in rare cases, unsatisfactory helpmeets for American
girls.  It is impossible to touch on more than a side or two of this
subject.  But as an illustration the following contrasted stories may be
cited:

Two sisters of an aristocratic American family, each with an income of
over forty thousand dollars a year, recently married French noblemen.
They naturally expected to continue abroad the life they had led at home,
in which opera boxes, saddle horses, and constant entertaining were
matters of course.  In both cases, our compatriots discovered that their
husbands (neither of them penniless) had entirely different views.  In
the first place, they were told that it was considered "bad form" in
France for young married women to entertain; besides, the money was
needed for improvements, and in many other ways, and as every well-to-do
French family puts aside at least a third of its income as _dots_ for the
children (boys as well as girls), these brides found themselves cramped
for money for the first time in their lives, and obliged, during their
one month a year in Paris, to put up with hired traps, and depend on
their friends for evenings at the opera.

This story is a telling set-off to the case of an American wife, who one
day received a windfall in the form of a check for a tidy amount.  She
immediately proposed a trip abroad to her husband, but found that he
preferred to remain at home in the society of his horses and dogs.  So
our fair compatriot starts off (with his full consent), has her outing,
spends her little "pile," and returns after three or four months to the
home of her delighted spouse.

Do these two stories need any comment?  Let our sisters and their friends
think twice before they make themselves irrevocably wheels in a machine
whose working is unknown to them, lest they be torn to pieces as it
moves.  Having the good luck to be born in the "paradise of women," let
them beware how they leave it, charm the serpent never so wisely, for
they may find themselves, like the Peri, outside the gate.




No. 6--The Complacency of Mediocrity


Full as small intellects are of queer kinks, unexplained turnings and
groundless likes and dislikes, the bland contentment that buoys up the
incompetent is the most difficult of all vagaries to account for.  Rarely
do twenty-four hours pass without examples of this exasperating weakness
appearing on the surface of those shallows that commonplace people so
naively call "their minds."

What one would expect is extreme modesty, in the half-educated or the
ignorant, and self-approbation higher up in the scale, where it might
more reasonably dwell.  Experience, however, teaches that exactly the
opposite is the case among those who have achieved success.

The accidents of a life turned by chance out of the beaten tracks, have
thrown me at times into acquaintanceship with some of the greater lights
of the last thirty years.  And not only have they been, as a rule, most
unassuming men and women; but in the majority of cases positively self-
depreciatory; doubting of themselves and their talents, constantly aiming
at greater perfection in their art or a higher development of their
powers, never contented with what they have achieved, beyond the idea
that it has been another step toward their goal.  Knowing this, it is
always a shock on meeting the mediocre people who form such a
discouraging majority in any society, to discover that they are all so
pleased with themselves, their achievements, their place in the world,
and their own ability and discernment!

Who has not sat chafing in silence while Mediocrity, in a white waistcoat
and jangling fobs, occupied the after-dinner hour in imparting second-
hand information as his personal views on literature and art?  Can you
not hear him saying once again: "I don't pretend to know anything about
art and all that sort of thing, you know, but when I go to an exhibition
I can always pick out the best pictures at a glance.  Sort of a way I
have, and I never make mistakes, you know."

Then go and watch, as I have, Henri Rochefort as he laboriously forms the
opinions that are to appear later in one of his "_Salons_," realizing the
while that he is _facile princeps_ among the art critics of his day, that
with a line he can make or mar a reputation and by a word draw the
admiring crowd around an unknown canvas.  While Rochefort toils and
ponders and hesitates, do you suppose a doubt as to his own astuteness
ever dims the self-complacency of White Waistcoat?  Never!

There lies the strength of the feeble-minded.  By a special dispensation
of Providence, they can never see but one side of a subject, so are
always convinced that they are right, and from the height of their
contentment, look down on those who chance to differ with them.

A lady who has gathered into her dainty salons the fruit of many years'
careful study and tireless "weeding" will ask anxiously if you are quite
sure you like the effect of her latest acquisition--some
eighteenth-century statuette or screen (flotsam, probably, from the great
shipwreck of Versailles), and listen earnestly to your verdict.  The good
soul who has just furnished her house by contract, with the latest "Louis
Fourteenth Street" productions, conducts you complacently through her
chambers of horrors, wreathed in tranquil smiles, born of ignorance and
that smug assurance granted only to the--small.

When a small intellect goes in for cultivating itself and improving its
mind, you realize what the poet meant in asserting that a little learning
was a dangerous thing.  For Mediocrity is apt, when it dines out, to get
up a subject beforehand, and announce to an astonished circle, as quite
new and personal discoveries, that the Renaissance was introduced into
France from Italy, or that Columbus in his day made important "finds."

When the incompetent advance another step and write or paint--which,
alas! is only too frequent--the world of art and literature is flooded
with their productions.  When White Waistcoat, for example, takes to
painting, late in life, and comes to you, canvas in hand, for criticism
(read praise), he is apt to remark modestly:

"Corot never painted until he was fifty, and I am only forty-eight.  So I
feel I should not let myself be discouraged."

The problem of life is said to be the finding of a happiness that is not
enjoyed at the expense of others, and surely this class have solved that
Sphinx's riddle, for they float through their days in a dream of
complacency disturbed neither by corroding doubt nor harassed by
jealousies.

Whole families of feeble-minded people, on the strength of an ancestor
who achieved distinction a hundred years ago, live in constant
thanksgiving that they "are not as other men."  None of the great man's
descendants have done anything to be particularly proud of since their
remote progenitor signed the Declaration of Independence or governed a
colony.  They have vegetated in small provincial cities and inter-married
into other equally fortunate families, but the sense of superiority is
ever present to sustain them, under straitened circumstances and
diminishing prestige.  The world may move on around them, but they never
advance.  Why should they?  They have reached perfection.  The brains and
enterprise that have revolutionized our age knock in vain at their doors.
They belong to that vast "majority that is always in the wrong," being so
pleased with themselves, their ways, and their feeble little lines of
thought, that any change or advancement gives their system a shock.

A painter I know was once importuned for a sketch by a lady of this
class.  After many delays and renewed demands he presented her one day,
when she and some friends were visiting his studio, with a delightful
open-air study simply framed.  She seemed confused at the offering, to
his astonishment, as she had not lacked _aplomb_ in asking for the
sketch.  After much blushing and fumbling she succeeded in getting the
painting loose, and handing back the frame, remarked:

"I will take the painting, but you must keep the frame.  My husband would
never allow me to accept anything of value from you!"--and smiled on the
speechless painter, doubtless charmed with her own tact.

Complacent people are the same drag on a society that a brake would be to
a coach going up hill.  They are the "eternal negative" and would
extinguish, if they could, any light stronger than that to which their
weak eyes have been accustomed.  They look with astonishment and distrust
at any one trying to break away from their tiresome old ways and habits,
and wonder why all the world is not as pleased with their personalities
as they are themselves, suggesting, if you are willing to waste your time
listening to their twaddle, that there is something radically wrong in
any innovation, that both "Church and State" will be imperilled if things
are altered.  No blight, no mildew is more fatal to a plant than the
"complacent" are to the world.  They resent any progress and are offended
if you mention before them any new standards or points of view.  "What
has been good enough for us and our parents should certainly be
satisfactory to the younger generations."  It seems to the contented like
pure presumption on the part of their acquaintances to wander after
strange gods, in the shape of new ideals, higher standards of culture, or
a perfected refinement of surroundings.

We are perhaps wrong to pity complacent people.  It is for another class
our sympathy should be kept; for those who cannot refrain from doubting
of themselves and the value of their work--those unfortunate gifted and
artistic spirits who descend too often the _via dolorosa_ of discontent
and despair, who have a higher ideal than their neighbors, and, in
struggling after an unattainable perfection, fall by the wayside.




No. 7--The Discontent of Talent


The complacency that buoys up self-sufficient souls, soothing them with
the illusion that they themselves, their towns, country, language, and
habits are above improvement, causing them to shudder, as at a sacrilege,
if any changes are suggested, is fortunately limited to a class of stay-
at-home nonentities.  In proportion as it is common among them, is it
rare or delightfully absent in any society of gifted or imaginative
people.

Among our globe-trotting compatriots this defect is much less general
than in the older nations of the world, for the excellent reason, that
the moment a man travels or takes the trouble to know people of different
nationalities, his armor of complacency receives so severe a blow, that
it is shattered forever, the wanderer returning home wiser and much more
modest.  There seems to be something fatal to conceit in the air of great
centres; professionally or in general society a man so soon finds his
level.

The "great world" may foster other faults; human nature is sure to
develop some in every walk of life.  Smug contentment, however,
disappears in its rarefied atmosphere, giving place to a craving for
improvement, a nervous alertness that keeps the mind from stagnating and
urges it on to do its best.

It is never the beautiful woman who sits down in smiling serenity before
her mirror.  She is tireless in her efforts to enhance her beauty and set
it off to the best advantage.  Her figure is never slender enough, nor
her carriage sufficiently erect to satisfy.  But the "frump" will let
herself and all her surroundings go to seed, not from humbleness of mind
or an overwhelming sense of her own unworthiness, but in pure complacent
conceit.

A criticism to which the highly gifted lay themselves open from those who
do not understand them, is their love of praise, the critics failing to
grasp the fact that this passion for measuring one's self with others,
like the gad-fly pursuing poor Io, never allows a moment's repose in the
green pastures of success, but goads them constantly up the rocky sides
of endeavor.  It is not that they love flattery, but that they need
approbation as a counterpoise to the dark moments of self-abasement and
as a sustaining aid for higher flights.

Many years ago I was present at a final sitting which my master, Carolus
Duran, gave to one of my fair compatriots.  He knew that the lady was
leaving Paris on the morrow, and that in an hour, her husband and his
friends were coming to see and criticise the portrait--always a terrible
ordeal for an artist.

To any one familiar with this painter's moods, it was evident that the
result of the sitting was not entirely satisfactory.  The quick
breathing, the impatient tapping movement of the foot, the swift backward
springs to obtain a better view, so characteristic of him in moments of
doubt, and which had twenty years before earned him the name of _le
danseur_ from his fellow-copyists at the Louvre, betrayed to even a
casual observer that his discouragement and discontent were at boiling
point.

The sound of a bell and a murmur of voices announced the entrance of the
visitors into the vast studio.  After the formalities of introduction had
been accomplished the new-comers glanced at the portrait, but uttered
never a word.  From it they passed in a perfectly casual manner to an
inspection of the beautiful contents of the room, investigating the
tapestries, admiring the armor, and finally, after another glance at the
portrait, the husband remarked: "You have given my wife a jolly long
neck, haven't you?" and, turning to his friends, began laughing and
chatting in English.

If vitriol had been thrown on my poor master's quivering frame, the
effect could not have been more instantaneous, his ignorance of the
language spoken doubtless exaggerating his impression of being ridiculed.
Suddenly he turned very white, and before any of us had divined his
intention he had seized a Japanese sword lying by and cut a dozen gashes
across the canvas.  Then, dropping his weapon, he flung out of the room,
leaving his sitter and her friends in speechless consternation, to wonder
then and ever after in what way they had offended him.  In their
opinions, if a man had talent and understood his business, he should
produce portraits with the same ease that he would answer dinner
invitations, and if they paid for, they were in no way bound also to
praise, his work.  They were entirely pleased with the result, but did
not consider it necessary to tell him so, no idea having crossed their
minds that he might be in one of those moods so frequent with artistic
natures, when words of approbation and praise are as necessary to them,
as the air we breathe is to us, mortals of a commoner clay.

Even in the theatrical and operatic professions, those hotbeds of
conceit, you will generally find among the "stars" abysmal depths of
discouragement and despair.  One great tenor, who has delighted New York
audiences during several winters past, invariably announces to his
intimates on arising that his "voice has gone," and that, in consequence
he will "never sing again," and has to be caressed and cajoled back into
some semblance of confidence before attempting a performance.  This same
artist, with an almost limitless repertoire and a reputation no new
successes could enhance, recently risked all to sing what he considered a
higher class of music, infinitely more fatiguing to his voice, because he
was impelled onward by the ideal that forces genius to constant
improvement and development of its powers.

What the people who meet these artists occasionally at a private concert
or behind the scenes during the intense strain of a representation, take
too readily for monumental egoism and conceit, is, the greater part of
the time, merely the desire for a sustaining word, a longing for the
stimulant of praise.

All actors and singers are but big children, and must be humored and
petted like children when you wish them to do their best.  It is
necessary for them to feel in touch with their audiences; to be assured
that they are not falling below the high ideals formed for their work.

Some winters ago a performance at the opera nearly came to a standstill
because an all-conquering soprano was found crying in her dressing-room.
After many weary moments of consolation and questioning, it came out that
she felt quite sure she no longer had any talent.  One of the other
singers had laughed at her voice, and in consequence there was nothing
left to live for.  A half-hour later, owing to judicious "treatment," she
was singing gloriously and bowing her thanks to thunders of applause.

Rather than blame this divine discontent that has made man what he is to-
day, let us glorify and envy it, pitying the while the frail mortal
vessels it consumes with its flame.  No adulation can turn such natures
from their goal, and in the hour of triumph the slave is always at their
side to whisper the word of warning.  This discontent is the leaven that
has raised the whole loaf of dull humanity to better things and higher
efforts, those privileged to feel it are the suns that illuminate our
system.  If on these luminaries observers have discovered spots, it is
well to remember that these blemishes are but the defects of their
qualities, and better far than the total eclipse that shrouds so large a
part of humanity in colorless complacency.

It will never be known how many master-pieces have been lost to the world
because at the critical moment a friend has not been at hand with the
stimulant of sympathy and encouragement needed by an overworked,
straining artist who was beginning to lose confidence in himself; to
soothe his irritated nerves with the balm of praise, and take his poor
aching head on a friendly shoulder and let him sob out there all his
doubt and discouragement.

So let us not be niggardly or ungenerous in meting out to struggling
fellow-beings their share, and perchance a little more than their share
of approbation and applause, poor enough return, after all, for the
pleasure their labors have procured us.  What adequate compensation can
we mete out to an author for the hours of delight and self-forgetfulness
his talent has brought to us in moments of loneliness, illness, or grief?
What can pay our debt to a painter who has fixed on canvas the face we
love?

The little return that it is in our power to make for all the joy these
gifted fellow-beings bring into our lives is (closing our eyes to minor
imperfections) to warmly applaud them as they move upward, along their
stony path.




No. 8--Slouch


I should like to see, in every school-room of our growing country, in
every business office, at the railway stations, and on street corners,
large placards placed with "Do not slouch" printed thereon in distinct
and imposing characters.  If ever there was a tendency that needed
nipping in the bud (I fear the bud is fast becoming a full-blown flower),
it is this discouraging national failing.

Each year when I return from my spring wanderings, among the benighted
and effete nations of the Old World, on whom the untravelled American
looks down from the height of his superiority, I am struck anew by the
contrast between the trim, well-groomed officials left behind on one side
of the ocean and the happy-go-lucky, slouching individuals I find on the
other.

As I ride up town this unpleasant impression deepens.  In the "little
Mother Isle" I have just left, bus-drivers have quite a coaching air,
with hat and coat of knowing form.  They sport flowers in their button-
holes and salute other bus-drivers, when they meet, with a twist of whip
and elbow refreshingly correct, showing that they take pride in their
calling, and have been at some pains to turn themselves out as smart in
appearance as finances would allow.

Here, on the contrary, the stage and cab drivers I meet seem to be under
a blight, and to have lost all interest in life.  They lounge on the box,
their legs straggling aimlessly, one hand holding the reins, the other
hanging dejectedly by the side.  Yet there is little doubt that these
heartbroken citizens are earning double what their London _confreres_
gain.  The shadow of the national peculiarity is over them.

When I get to my rooms, the elevator boy is reclining in the lift, and
hardly raises his eye-lids as he languidly manoeuvres the rope.  I have
seen that boy now for months, but never when his boots and clothes were
brushed or when his cravat was not riding proudly above his collar.  On
occasions I have offered him pins, which he took wearily, doubtless
because it was less trouble than to refuse.  The next day, however, his
cravat again rode triumphant, mocking my efforts to keep it in its place.
His hair, too, has been a cause of wonder to me.  How does he manage to
have it always so long and so unkempt?  More than once, when expecting
callers, I have bribed him to have it cut, but it seemed to grow in the
night, back to its poetic profusion.

In what does this noble disregard for appearances which characterizes
American men originate?  Our climate, as some suggest, or discouragement
at not all being millionaires?  It more likely comes from an absence with
us of the military training that abroad goes so far toward licking young
men into shape.

I shall never forget the surprise on the face of a French statesman to
whom I once expressed my sympathy for his country, laboring under the
burden of so vast a standing army.  He answered:

"The financial burden is doubtless great; but you have others.  Witness
your pension expenditures.  With us the money drawn from the people is
used in such a way as to be of inestimable value to them.  We take the
young hobbledehoy farm-hand or mechanic, ignorant, mannerless, uncleanly
as he may be, and turn him out at the end of three years with his
regiment, self-respecting and well-mannered, with habits of cleanliness
and obedience, having acquired a bearing, and a love of order that will
cling to and serve him all his life.  We do not go so far," he added, "as
our English neighbors in drilling men into superb manikins of 'form' and
carriage.  Our authorities do not consider it necessary.  But we reclaim
youths from the slovenliness of their native village or workshop and make
them tidy and mannerly citizens."

These remarks came to mind the other day as I watched a group of New
England youths lounging on the steps of the village store, or sitting in
rows on a neighboring fence, until I longed to try if even a judicial
arrangement of tacks, 'business-end up,' on these favorite seats would
infuse any energy into their movements.  I came to the conclusion that my
French acquaintance was right, for the only trim-looking men to be seen,
were either veterans of our war or youths belonging to the local militia.
And nowhere does one see finer specimens of humanity than West Point and
Annapolis turn out.

If any one doubts what kind of men slouching youths develop into, let him
look when he travels, at the dejected appearance of the farmhouses
throughout our land.  Surely our rural populations are not so much poorer
than those of other countries.  Yet when one compares the dreary homes of
even our well-to-do farmers with the smiling, well-kept hamlets seen in
England or on the Continent, such would seem to be the case.

If ours were an old and bankrupt nation, this air of discouragement and
decay could not be greater.  Outside of the big cities one looks in vain
for some sign of American dash and enterprise in the appearance of our
men and their homes.

During a journey of over four thousand miles, made last spring as the
guest of a gentleman who knows our country thoroughly, I was impressed
most painfully with this abject air.  Never in all those days did we see
a fruit-tree trained on some sunny southern wall, a smiling flower-garden
or carefully clipped hedge.  My host told me that hardly the necessary
vegetables are grown, the inhabitants of the West and South preferring
canned food.  It is less trouble!

If you wish to form an idea of the extent to which slouch prevails in our
country, try to start a "village improvement society," and experience, as
others have done, the apathy and ill-will of the inhabitants when you go
about among them and strive to summon some of their local pride to your
aid.

In the town near which I pass my summers, a large stone, fallen from a
passing dray, lay for days in the middle of the principal street, until I
paid some boys to remove it.  No one cared, and the dull-eyed inhabitants
would doubtless be looking at it still but for my impatience.

One would imagine the villagers were all on the point of moving away (and
they generally are, if they can sell their land), so little interest do
they show in your plans.  Like all people who have fallen into bad
habits, they have grown to love their slatternly ways and cling to them,
resenting furiously any attempt to shake them up to energy and reform.

The farmer has not, however, a monopoly.  Slouch seems ubiquitous.  Our
railway and steam-boat systems have tried in vain to combat it, and
supplied their employees with a livery (I beg the free and independent
voter's pardon, a uniform!), with but little effect.  The inherent
tendency is too strong for the corporations.  The conductors still
shuffle along in their spotted garments, the cap on the back of the head,
and their legs anywhere, while they chew gum in defiance of the whole
Board of Directors.

Go down to Washington, after a visit to the Houses of Parliament or the
Chamber of Deputies, and observe the contrast between the bearing of our
Senators and Representatives and the air of their _confreres_ abroad.  Our
law-makers seem trying to avoid every appearance of "smartness."  Indeed,
I am told, so great is the prejudice in the United States against a well-
turned-out man that a candidate would seriously compromise his chances of
election who appeared before his constituents in other than the
accustomed shabby frock-coat, unbuttoned and floating, a pot hat, no
gloves, as much doubtfully white shirt-front as possible, and a wisp of
black silk for a tie; and if he can exhibit also a chin-whisker, his
chances of election are materially increased.

Nothing offends an eye accustomed to our native _laisser aller_ so much
as a well-brushed hat and shining boots.  When abroad, it is easy to spot
a compatriot as soon and as far as you can see one, by his graceless
gait, a cross between a lounge and a shuffle.  In reading-, or dining-
room, he is the only man whose spine does not seem equal to its work, so
he flops and straggles until, for the honor of your land, you long to
shake him and set him squarely on his legs.

No amount of reasoning can convince me that outward slovenliness is not a
sign of inward and moral supineness.  A neglected exterior generally
means a lax moral code.  The man who considers it too much trouble to sit
erect can hardly have given much time to his tub or his toilet.  Having
neglected his clothes, he will neglect his manners, and between morals
and manners we know the tie is intimate.

In the Orient a new reign is often inaugurated by the construction of a
mosque.  Vast expense is incurred to make it as splendid as possible.
But, once completed, it is never touched again.  Others are built by
succeeding sovereigns, but neither thought nor treasure is ever expended
on the old ones.  When they can no longer be used, they are abandoned,
and fall into decay.  The same system seems to prevail among our private
owners and corporations.  Streets are paved, lamp-posts erected, store-
fronts carefully adorned, but from the hour the workman puts his
finishing touch upon them they are abandoned to the hand of fate.  The
mud may cake up knee-deep, wind and weather work their own sweet will, it
is no one's business to interfere.

When abroad one of my amusements has been of an early morning to watch
Paris making its toilet.  The streets are taking a bath, liveried
attendants are blacking the boots of the lamp-posts and
newspaper-_kiosques_, the shop-fronts are being shaved and having their
hair curled, cafe's and restaurants are putting on clean shirts and tying
their cravats smartly before their many mirrors.  By the time the world
is up and about, the whole city, smiling freshly from its matutinal tub,
is ready to greet it gayly.

It is this attention to detail that gives to Continental cities their air
of cheerfulness and thrift, and the utter lack of it that impresses
foreigners so painfully on arriving at our shores.

It has been the fashion to laugh at the dude and his high collar, at the
darky in his master's cast-off clothes, aping style and fashion.  Better
the dude, better the colored dandy, better even the Bowery "tough" with
his affected carriage, for they at least are reaching blindly out after
something better than their surroundings, striving after an ideal, and
are in just so much the superiors of the foolish souls who mock
them--better, even misguided efforts, than the ignoble stagnant quagmire
of slouch into which we seem to be slowly descending.




No. 9--Social Suggestion


The question of how far we are unconsciously influenced by people and
surroundings, in our likes and dislikes, our opinions, and even in our
pleasures and intimate tastes, is a delicate and interesting one, for the
line between success and failure in the world, as on the stage or in most
of the professions, is so narrow and depends so often on what humor one's
"public" happen to be in at a particular moment, that the subject is
worthy of consideration.

Has it never happened to you, for instance, to dine with friends and go
afterwards in a jolly humor to the play which proved so delightful that
you insist on taking your family immediately to see it; when to your
astonishment you discover that it is neither clever nor amusing, on the
contrary rather dull.  Your family look at you in amazement and wonder
what you had seen to admire in such an asinine performance.  There was a
case of suggestion!  You had been influenced by your friends and had
shared their opinions.  The same thing occurs on a higher scale when one
is raised out of one's self by association with gifted and original
people, a communion with more cultivated natures which causes you to
discover and appreciate a thousand hidden beauties in literature, art or
music that left to yourself, you would have failed to notice.  Under
these circumstances you will often be astonished at the point and
piquancy of your own conversation.  This is but too true of a number of
subjects.

We fondly believe our opinions and convictions to be original, and with
innocent conceit, imagine that we have formed them for ourselves.  The
illusion of being unlike other people is a common vanity.  Beware of the
man who asserts such a claim.  He is sure to be a bore and will serve up
to you, as his own, a muddle of ideas and opinions which he has absorbed
like a sponge from his surroundings.

No place is more propitious for studying this curious phenomenon, than
behind the scenes of a theatre, the last few nights before a first
performance.  The whole company is keyed up to a point of mutual
admiration that they are far from feeling generally.  "The piece is
charming and sure to be a success."  The author and the interpreters of
his thoughts are in complete communion.  The first night comes.  The
piece is a failure!  Drop into the greenroom then and you will find an
astonishing change has taken place.  The Star will take you into a corner
and assert that, she "always knew the thing could not go, it was too
imbecile, with such a company, it was folly to expect anything else."  The
author will abuse the Star and the management.  The whole troupe is
frankly disconcerted, like people aroused out of a hypnotic sleep,
wondering what they had seen in the play to admire.

In the social world we are even more inconsistent, accepting with
tameness the most astonishing theories and opinions.  Whole circles will
go on assuring each other how clever Miss So-and-So is, or, how beautiful
they think someone else.  Not because these good people are any cleverer,
or more attractive than their neighbors, but simply because it is in the
air to have these opinions about them.  To such an extent does this hold
good, that certain persons are privileged to be vulgar and rude, to say
impertinent things and make remarks that would ostracize a less fortunate
individual from the polite world for ever; society will only smilingly
shrug its shoulders and say: "It is only Mr. So-and-So's way."  It is
useless to assert that in cases like these, people are in possession of
their normal senses.  They are under influences of which they are
perfectly unconscious.

Have you ever seen a piece guyed?  Few sadder sights exist, the human
being rarely getting nearer the brute than when engaged in this
amusement.  Nothing the actor or actress can do will satisfy the public.
Men who under ordinary circumstances would be incapable of insulting a
woman, will whistle and stamp and laugh, at an unfortunate girl who is
doing her utmost to amuse them.  A terrible example of this was given two
winters ago at one of our concert halls, when a family of Western singers
were subjected to absolute ill-treatment at the hands of the public.  The
young girls were perfectly sincere, in their rude way, but this did not
prevent men from offering them every insult malice could devise, and
making them a target for every missile at hand.  So little does the
public think for itself in cases like this, that at the opening of the
performance had some well-known person given the signal for applause, the
whole audience would, in all probability, have been delighted and made
the wretched sisters a success.

In my youth it was the fashion to affect admiration for the Italian
school of painting and especially for the great masters of the
Renaissance.  Whole families of perfectly inartistic English and
Americans might then he heard conscientiously admiring the ceiling of the
Sistine Chapel or Leonardo's Last Supper (Botticelli had not been
invented then) in the choicest guide-book language.

When one considers the infinite knowledge of technique required to
understand the difficulties overcome by the giants of the Renaissance and
to appreciate the intrinsic qualities of their creations, one asks one's
self in wonder what our parents admired in those paintings, and what
tempted them to bring home and adorn their houses with such dreadful
copies of their favorites.  For if they appreciated the originals they
never would have bought the copies, and if the copies pleased them, they
must have been incapable of enjoying the originals.  Yet all these people
thought themselves perfectly sincere.  To-day you will see the same thing
going on before the paintings of Claude Monet and Besnard, the same
admiration expressed by people who, you feel perfectly sure, do not
realize why these works of art are superior and can no more explain to
you why they think as they do than the sheep that follow each other
through a hole in a wall, can give a reason for their actions.

Dress and fashion in clothes are subjects above all others, where the
ineptitude of the human mind is most evident.  Can it be explained in any
other way, why the fashions of yesterday always appear so hideous to
us,--almost grotesque?  Take up an old album of photographs and glance
over the faded contents.  Was there ever anything so absurd?  Look at the
top hats men wore, and at the skirts of the women!

The mother of a family said to me the other day: "When I recall the way
in which girls were dressed in my youth, I wonder how any of us ever got
a husband."

Study a photograph of the Empress Eugenie, that supreme arbiter of
elegance and grace.  Oh! those bunchy hooped skirts!  That awful India
shawl pinned off the shoulders, and the bonnet perched on a roll of hair
in the nape of the neck!  What were people thinking of at that time?  Were
they lunatics to deform in this way the beautiful lines of the human body
which it should be the first object of toilet to enhance, or were they
only lacking in the artistic sense?  Nothing of the kind.  And what is
more, they were convinced that the real secret of beauty in dress had
been discovered by them; that past fashions were absurd, and that the
future could not improve on their creations.  The sculptors and painters
of that day (men of as great talent as any now living), were enthusiastic
in reproducing those monstrosities in marble or on canvas, and authors
raved about the ideal grace with which a certain beauty draped her shawl.

Another marked manner in which we are influenced by circumambient
suggestion, is in the transient furore certain games and pastimes create.
We see intelligent people so given over to this influence as barely to
allow themselves time to eat and sleep, begrudging the hours thus stolen
from their favorite amusement.

Ten years ago, tennis occupied every moment of our young people's time;
now golf has transplanted tennis in public favor, which does not prove,
however, that the latter is the better game, but simply that compelled by
the accumulated force of other people's opinions, youths and maidens, old
duffers and mature spinsters are willing to pass many hours daily in all
kinds of weather, solemnly following an indian-rubber ball across ten-
acre lots.

If you suggest to people who are laboring under the illusion they are
amusing themselves that the game, absorbing so much of their attention,
is not as exciting as tennis nor as clever in combinations as croquet,
that in fact it would be quite as amusing to roll an empty barrel several
times around a plowed field, they laugh at you in derision and instantly
put you down in their profound minds as a man who does not understand
"sport."

Yet these very people were tennis-mad twenty years ago and had night come
to interrupt a game of croquet would have ordered lanterns lighted in
order to finish the match so enthralling were its intricacies.

Everybody has known how to play _Bezique_ in this country for years, yet
within the last eighteen months, whole circles of our friends have been
seized with a midsummer madness and willingly sat glued to a card-table
through long hot afternoons and again after dinner until day dawned on
their folly.

Certain _Memoires_ of Louis Fifteenth's reign tell of an "unravelling"
mania that developed at his court.  It began by some people fraying out
old silks to obtain the gold and silver threads from worn-out stuffs;
this occupation soon became the rage, nothing could restrain the delirium
of destruction, great ladies tore priceless tapestries from their walls
and brocades from their furniture, in order to unravel those materials
and as the old stock did not suffice for the demand thousands were spent
on new brocades and velvets, which were instantly destroyed,
entertainments were given where unravelling was the only amusement
offered, the entire court thinking and talking of nothing else for
months.

What is the logical deduction to be drawn from all this?  Simply that
people do not see with their eyes or judge with their understandings;
that an all-pervading hypnotism, an ambient suggestion, at times envelops
us taking from people all free will, and replacing it with the taste and
judgment of the moment.

The number of people is small in each generation, who are strong enough
to rise above their surroundings and think for themselves.  The rest are
as dry leaves on a stream.  They float along and turn gayly in the
eddies, convinced all the time (as perhaps are the leaves) that they act
entirely from their own volition and that their movements are having a
profound influence on the direction and force of the current.




No. 10--Bohemia


Lunching with a talented English comedian and his wife the other day, the
conversation turned on Bohemia, the evasive no-man's-land that Thackeray
referred to, in so many of his books, and to which he looked back
lovingly in his later years, when, as he said, he had forgotten the road
to Prague.

The lady remarked: "People have been more than kind to us here in New
York.  We have dined and supped out constantly, and have met with
gracious kindness, such as we can never forget.  But so far we have not
met a single painter, or author, or sculptor, or a man who has explored a
corner of the earth.  Neither have we had the good luck to find ourselves
in the same room with Tesla or Rehan, Edison or Drew.  We shall regret so
much when back in England and are asked about your people of talent,
being obliged to say, 'We never met any of them.'  Why is it?  We have
not been in any one circle, and have pitched our tents in many cities,
during our tours over here, but always with the same result.  We read
your American authors as much as, if not more than, our own.  The names
of dozens of your discoverers and painters are household words in
England.  When my husband planned his first tour over here my one idea
was, 'How nice it will be!  Now I shall meet those delightful people of
whom I have heard so much.'  The disappointment has been complete.  Never
one have I seen."

I could not but feel how all too true were the remarks of this
intelligent visitor, remembering how quick the society of London is to
welcome a new celebrity or original character, how a place is at once
made for him at every hospitable board, a permanent one to which he is
expected to return; and how no Continental entertainment is considered
complete without some bright particular star to shine in the firmament.

"Lion-hunting," I hear my reader say with a sneer.  That may be, but it
makes society worth the candle, which it rarely is over here.  I realized
what I had often vaguely felt before, that the Bohemia the English lady
was looking for was not to be found in this country, more's the pity.  Not
that the elements are lacking.  Far from it, (for even more than in
London should we be able to combine such a society), but perhaps from a
misconception of the true idea of such a society, due probably to Henry
Murger's dreary book _Scenes de la vie de Boheme_ which is chargeable
with the fact that a circle of this kind evokes in the mind of most
Americans visions of a scrubby, poorly-fed and less-washed community, a
world they would hardly dare ask to their tables for fear of some
embarrassing unconventionality of conduct or dress.

Yet that can hardly be the reason, for even in Murger or Paul de Kock, at
their worst, the hero is still a gentleman, and even when he borrows a
friend's coat, it is to go to a great house and among people of rank.
Besides, we are becoming too cosmopolitan, and wander too constantly over
this little globe, not to have learned that the Bohemia of 1830 is as
completely a thing of the past as a _grisette_ or a glyphisodon.  It
disappeared with Gavarni and the authors who described it.  Although we
have kept the word, its meaning has gradually changed until it has come
to mean something difficult to define, a will-o'-the-wisp, which one
tries vainly to grasp.  With each decade it has put on a new form and
changed its centre, the one definite fact being that it combines the
better elements of several social layers.

Drop in, if you are in Paris and know the way, at one of Madeleine
Lemaire's informal evenings in her studio.  There you may find the Prince
de Ligne, chatting with Rejane or Coquelin; or Henri d'Orleans, just back
from an expedition into Africa.  A little further on, Saint-Saens will be
running over the keys, preparing an accompaniment for one of Madame de
Tredern's songs.  The Princess Mathilde (that passionate lover of art)
will surely be there, and--but it is needless to particularize.

Cross the Channel, and get yourself asked to one of Irving's choice
suppers after the play.  You will find the bar, the stage, and the pulpit
represented there, a "happy family" over which the "Prince" often
presides, smoking cigar after cigar, until the tardy London daylight
appears to break up the entertainment.

For both are centres where the gifted and the travelled meet the great of
the social world, on a footing of perfect equality, and where, if any
prestige is accorded, it is that of brains.  When you have seen these
places and a dozen others like them, you will realize what the actor's
wife had in her mind.

Now, let me whisper to you why I think such circles do not exist in this
country.  In the first place, we are still too provincial in this big
city of ours.  New York always reminds me of a definition I once heard of
California fruit: "Very large, with no particular flavor."  We are like a
boy, who has had the misfortune to grow too quickly and look like a man,
but whose mind has not kept pace with his body.  What he knows is
undigested and chaotic, while his appearance makes you expect more of him
than he can give--hence disappointment.

Our society is yet in knickerbockers, and has retained all sorts of
littlenesses and prejudices which older civilizations have long since
relegated to the mental lumber room.  An equivalent to this point of view
you will find in England or France only in the smaller "cathedral"
cities, and even there the old aristocrats have the courage of their
opinions.  Here, where everything is quite frankly on a money basis, and
"positions" are made and lost like a fortune, by a turn of the market,
those qualities which are purely mental, and on which it is hard to put a
practical value, are naturally at a discount.  We are quite ready to pay
for the best.  Witness our private galleries and the opera, but we say,
like the parvenu in Emile Augier's delightful comedy _Le Gendre de M.
Poirier_, "Patronize art?  Of course!  But the artists?  Never!"  And
frankly, it would be too much, would it not, to expect a family only half
a generation away from an iron foundry, or a mine, to be willing to
receive Irving or Bernhardt on terms of perfect equality?

As it would be unjust to demand a mature mind in the overgrown boy, it is
useless to hope for delicate tact and social feeling from the parvenu.  To
be gracious and at ease with all classes and professions, one must be
perfectly sure of one's own position, and with us few feel this security,
it being based on too frail a foundation, a crisis in the "street" going
a long way towards destroying it.

Of course I am generalizing and doubt not that in many cultivated homes
the right spirit exists, but unfortunately these are not the centres
which give the tone to our "world."  Lately at one of the most splendid
houses in this city a young Italian tenor had been engaged to sing.  When
he had finished he stood alone, unnoticed, unspoken to for the rest of
the evening.  He had been paid to sing.  "What more, in common sense,
could he want?" thought the "world," without reflecting that it was
probably not the _tenor_ who lost by that arrangement.  It needs a
delicate hand to hold the reins over the backs of such a fine-mouthed
community as artists and singers form.  They rarely give their best when
singing or performing in a hostile atmosphere.

A few years ago when a fancy-dress ball was given at the Academy of
Design, the original idea was to have it an artists' ball; the community
of the brush were, however, approached with such a complete lack of tact
that, with hardly an exception, they held aloof, and at the ball shone
conspicuous by their absence.

At present in this city I know of but two hospitable firesides where you
are sure to meet the best the city holds of either foreign or native
talent.  The one is presided over by the wife of a young composer, and
the other, oddly enough, by two unmarried ladies.  An invitation to a
dinner or a supper at either of these houses is as eagerly sought after
and as highly prized in the great world as it is by the Bohemians, though
neither "salon" is open regularly.

There is still hope for us, and I already see signs of better things.
Perhaps, when my English friend returns in a few years, we may be able to
prove to her that we have found the road to Prague.




No. 11--Social Exiles


Balzac, in his _Comedie Humaine_, has reviewed with a master-hand almost
every phase of the Social World of Paris down to 1850 and Thackeray left
hardly a corner of London High Life unexplored; but so great have been
the changes (progress, its admirers call it,) since then, that, could
Balzac come back to his beloved Paris, he would feel like a foreigner
there; and Thackeray, who was among us but yesterday, would have
difficulty in finding his bearings in the sea of the London world to-day.

We have changed so radically that even a casual observer cannot help
being struck by the difference.  Among other most significant "phenomena"
has appeared a phase of life that not only neither of these great men
observed (for the very good reason that it had not appeared in their
time), but which seems also to have escaped the notice of the writers of
our own day, close observers as they are of any new development.  I mean
the class of Social Exiles, pitiable wanderers from home and country, who
haunt the Continent, and are to be found (sad little colonies) in out-of-
the-way corners of almost every civilized country.

To know much of this form of modern life, one must have been a wanderer,
like myself, and have pitched his tent in many queer places; for they are
shy game and not easily raised, frequenting mostly quiet old cities like
Versailles and Florence, or inexpensive watering-places where their
meagre incomes become affluence by contrast.  The first thought on
dropping in on such a settlement is, "How in the world did these people
ever drift here?"  It is simple enough and generally comes about in this
way:

The father of a wealthy family dies.  The fortune turns out to be less
than was expected.  The widow and children decide to go abroad for a year
or so, during their period of mourning, partially for distraction, and
partially (a fact which is not spoken of) because at home they would be
forced to change their way of living to a simpler one, and that is hard
to do, just at first.  Later they think it will be quite easy.  So the
family emigrates, and after a little sight-seeing, settles in Dresden or
Tours, casually at first, in a hotel.  If there are young children they
are made the excuse.  "The languages are so important!"  Or else one of
the daughters develops a taste for music, or a son takes up the study of
art.  In a year or two, before a furnished apartment is taken, the idea
of returning is discussed, but abandoned "for the present."  They begin
vaguely to realize how difficult it will be to take life up again at
home.  During all this time their income (like everything else when the
owners are absent) has been slowly but surely disappearing, making the
return each year more difficult.  Finally, for economy, an unfurnished
apartment is taken.  They send home for bits of furniture and family
belongings, and gradually drop into the great army of the expatriated.

Oh, the pathos of it!  One who has not seen these poor stranded waifs in
their self-imposed exile, with eyes turned towards their native land,
cannot realize all the sadness and loneliness they endure, rarely
adopting the country of their residence but becoming more firmly American
as the years go by.  The home papers and periodicals are taken, the
American church attended, if there happens to be one; the English chapel,
if there is not.  Never a French church!  In their hearts they think it
almost irreverent to read the service in French.  The acquaintance of a
few fellow-exiles is made and that of a half-dozen English families,
mothers and daughters and a younger son or two, whom the ferocious
primogeniture custom has cast out of the homes of their childhood to
economize on the Continent.

I have in my mind a little settlement of this kind at Versailles, which
was a type.  The formal old city, fallen from its grandeur, was a
singularly appropriate setting to the little comedy.  There the modest
purses of the exiles found rents within their reach, the quarters vast
and airy.  The galleries and the park afforded a diversion, and then
Paris, dear Paris, the American Mecca, was within reach.  At the time I
knew it, the colony was fairly prosperous, many of its members living in
the two or three principal _pensions_, the others in apartments of their
own.  They gave feeble little entertainments among themselves,
card-parties and teas, and dined about with each other at their
respective _tables d'hote_, even knowing a stray Frenchman or two, whom
the quest of a meal had tempted out of their native fastnesses as it does
the wolves in a hard winter.  Writing and receiving letters from America
was one of the principal occupations, and an epistle descriptive of a
particular event at home went the rounds, and was eagerly read and
discussed.

The merits of the different _pensions_ also formed a subject of vital
interest.  The advantages and disadvantages of these rival establishments
were, as a topic, never exhausted.  _Madame une telle_ gave five o'clock
tea, included in the seven francs a day, but her rival gave one more meat
course at dinner and her coffee was certainly better, while a third
undoubtedly had a nicer set of people.  No one here at home can realize
the importance these matters gradually assume in the eyes of the exiles.
Their slender incomes have to be so carefully handled to meet the strain
of even this simple way of living, if they are to show a surplus for a
little trip to the seashore in the summer months, that an extra franc a
day becomes a serious consideration.

Every now and then a family stronger-minded than the others, or with
serious reasons for returning home (a daughter to bring out or a son to
put into business), would break away from its somnolent surroundings and
re-cross the Atlantic, alternating between hope and fear.  It is here
that a sad fate awaits these modern Rip Van Winkles.  They find their
native cities changed beyond recognition.  (For we move fast in these
days.)  The mother gets out her visiting list of ten years before and is
thunderstruck to find that it contains chiefly names of the "dead, the
divorced, and defaulted."  The waves of a decade have washed over her
place and the world she once belonged to knows her no more.  The leaders
of her day on whose aid she counted have retired from the fray.  Younger,
and alas! unknown faces sit in the opera boxes and around the dinner
tables where before she had found only friends.  After a feeble little
struggle to get again into the "swim," the family drifts back across the
ocean into the quiet back water of a continental town, and goes circling
around with the other twigs and dry leaves, moral flotsam and jetsam,
thrown aside by the great rush of the outside world.

For the parents the life is not too sad.  They have had their day, and
are, perhaps, a little glad in their hearts of a quiet old age, away from
the heat and sweat of the battle; but for the younger generation it is
annihilation.  Each year their circle grows smaller.  Death takes away
one member after another of the family, until one is left alone in a
foreign land with no ties around her, or with her far-away "home," the
latter more a name now than a reality.

A year or two ago I was taking luncheon with our consul at his primitive
villa, an hour's ride from the city of Tangier, a ride made on donkey-
back, as no roads exist in that sunny land.  After our coffee and cigars,
he took me a half-hour's walk into the wilderness around him to call on
his nearest neighbors, whose mode of existence seemed a source of anxiety
to him.  I found myself in the presence of two American ladies, the
younger being certainly not less than seventy-five.  To my astonishment I
found they had been living there some thirty years, since the death of
their parents, in an isolation and remoteness impossible to describe, in
an Arab house, with native servants, "the world forgetting, by the world
forgot."  Yet these ladies had names well known in New York fifty years
ago.

The glimpse I had of their existence made me thoughtful as I rode home in
the twilight, across a suburb none too safe for strangers.  What had the
future in store for those two?  Or, worse still, for the survivor of
those two?  In contrast, I saw a certain humble "home" far away in
America, where two old ladies were ending their lives surrounded by
loving friends and relations, honored and cherished and guarded tenderly
from the rude world.

In big cities like Paris and Rome there is another class of the
expatriated, the wealthy who have left their homes in a moment of pique
after the failure of some social or political ambition; and who find in
these centres the recognition refused them at home and for which their
souls thirsted.

It is not to these I refer, although it is curious to see a group of
people living for years in a country of which they, half the time, do not
speak the language (beyond the necessities of housekeeping and shopping),
knowing but few of its inhabitants, and seeing none of the society of the
place, their acquaintance rarely going beyond that equivocal, hybrid
class that surrounds rich "strangers" and hangs on to the outer edge of
the _grand monde_.  One feels for this latter class merely contempt, but
one's pity is reserved for the former.  What object lessons some lives on
the Continent would be to impatient souls at home, who feel discontented
with their surroundings, and anxious to break away and wander abroad!  Let
them think twice before they cut the thousand ties it has taken a
lifetime to form.  Better monotony at your own fireside, my friends,
where at the worst, you are known and have your place, no matter how
small, than an old age among strangers.




No. 12--"Seven Ages" of Furniture


The progress through life of active-minded Americans is apt to be a
series of transformations.  At each succeeding phase of mental
development, an old skin drops from their growing intelligence, and they
assimilate the ideas and tastes of their new condition, with a facility
and completeness unknown to other nations.

One series of metamorphoses particularly amusing to watch is, that of an
observant, receptive daughter of Uncle Sam who, aided and followed (at a
distance) by an adoring husband, gradually develops her excellent brain,
and rises through fathoms of self-culture and purblind experiment, to the
surface of dilettantism and connoisseurship.  One can generally detect
the exact stage of evolution such a lady has reached by the bent of her
conversation, the books she is reading, and, last but not least, by her
material surroundings; no outward and visible signs reflecting inward and
spiritual grace so clearly as the objects people collect around them for
the adornment of their rooms, or the way in which those rooms are
decorated.

A few years ago, when a young man and his bride set up housekeeping on
their own account, the "old people" of both families seized the
opportunity to unload on the beginners (under the pretence of helping
them along) a quantity of furniture and belongings that had (as the
shopkeepers say) "ceased to please" their original owners.  The narrow
quarters of the tyros are encumbered by ungainly sofas and arm-chairs,
most probably of carved rosewood.  _Etageres_ of the same lugubrious
material grace the corners of their tiny drawing-room, the bits of mirror
inserted between the shelves distorting the image of the owners into
headless or limbless phantoms.  Half of their little dining-room is
filled with a black-walnut sideboard, ingeniously contrived to take up as
much space as possible and hold nothing, its graceless top adorned with a
stag's head carved in wood and imitation antlers.

The novices in their innocence live contented amid their hideous
surroundings for a year or two, when the wife enters her second epoch,
which, for want of a better word, we will call the Japanese period.  The
grim furniture gradually disappears under a layer of silk and gauze
draperies, the bare walls blossom with paper umbrellas, fans are nailed
in groups promiscuously, wherever an empty space offends her eye.  Bows
of ribbon are attached to every possible protuberance of the furniture.
Even the table service is not spared.  I remember dining at a house in
this stage of its artistic development, where the marrow bones that
formed one course of the dinner appeared each with a coquettish little
bow-knot of pink ribbon around its neck.

Once launched on this sea of adornment, the housewife soon loses her
bearings and decorates indiscriminately.  Her old evening dresses serve
to drape the mantelpieces, and she passes every spare hour embroidering,
braiding, or fringing some material to adorn her rooms.  At Christmas her
friends contribute specimens of their handiwork to the collection.

The view of other houses and other decorations before long introduces the
worm of discontent into the blossom of our friend's contentment.  The
fruit of her labors becomes tasteless on her lips.  As the finances of
the family are satisfactory, the re-arrangement of the parlor floor is
(at her suggestion) confided to a firm of upholsterers, who make a clean
sweep of the rosewood and the bow-knots, and retire, after some months of
labor, leaving the delighted wife in possession of a suite of rooms
glittering with every monstrosity that an imaginative tradesman, spurred
on by unlimited credit, could devise.

The wood work of the doors and mantels is an intricate puzzle of inlaid
woods, the ceilings are panelled and painted in complicated designs.  The
"parlor" is provided with a complete set of neat, old-gold satin
furniture, puffed at its angles with peacock-colored plush.

The monumental folding doors between the long, narrow rooms are draped
with the same chaste combination of stuffs.

The dining-room blazes with a gold and purple wall paper, set off by
ebonized wood work and furniture.  The conscientious contractor has
neglected no corner.  Every square inch of the ceilings, walls, and
floors has been carved, embossed, stencilled, or gilded into a
bewildering monotony.

The husband, whose affairs are rapidly increasing on his hands, has no
time to attend to such insignificant details as house decoration, the
wife has perfect confidence in the taste of the firm employed.  So at the
suggestion of the latter, and in order to complete the beauty of the
rooms, a Bouguereau, a Toulmouche and a couple of Schreyers are bought,
and a number of modern French bronzes scattered about on the multicolored
cabinets.  Then, at last, the happy owners of all this splendor open
their doors to the admiration of their friends.

About the time the peacock plush and the gilding begin to show signs of
wear and tear, rumors of a fresh fashion in decoration float across from
England, and the new gospel of the beautiful according to Clarence Cook
is first preached to an astonished nation.

The fortune of our couple continuing to develop with pleasing rapidity,
the building of a country house is next decided upon.  A friend of the
husband, who has recently started out as an architect, designs them a
picturesque residence without a straight line on its exterior or a square
room inside.  This house is done up in strict obedience to the teachings
of the new sect.  The dining-room is made about as cheerful as the
entrance to a family vault.  The rest of the house bears a close
resemblance to an ecclesiastical junk shop.  The entrance hall is filled
with what appears to be a communion table in solid oak, and the massive
chairs and settees of the parlor suggest the withdrawing room of Rowena,
aesthetic shades of momie-cloth drape deep-set windows, where anaemic and
disjointed females in stained glass pluck conventional roses.

To each of these successive transitions the husband has remained
obediently and tranquilly indifferent.  He has in his heart considered
them all equally unfitting and uncomfortable and sighed in regretful
memory of a deep, old-fashioned arm-chair that sheltered his after-dinner
naps in the early rosewood period.  So far he has been as clay in the
hands of his beloved wife, but the anaemic ladies and the communion table
are the last drop that causes his cup to overflow.  He revolts and begins
to take matters into his own hands with the result that the household
enters its fifth incarnation under his guidance, during which everything
is painted white and all the wall-papers are a vivid scarlet.  The family
sit on bogus Chippendale and eat off blue and white china.

With the building of their grand new house near the park the couple rise
together into the sixth cycle of their development.  Having travelled and
studied the epochs by this time, they can tell a Louis XIV. from a Louis
XV. room, and recognize that mahogany and brass sphinxes denote furniture
of the Empire.  This newly acquired knowledge is, however, vague and
hazy.  They have no confidence in themselves, so give over the fitting of
their principal floors to the New York branch of a great French house.
Little is talked of now but periods, plans, and elevations.  Under the
guidance of the French firm, they acquire at vast expense, faked
reproductions as historic furniture.

The spacious rooms are sticky with new gilding, and the flowered brocades
of the hangings and furniture crackle to the touch.  The rooms were not
designed by the architect to receive any special kind of "treatment."
Immense folding-doors unite the salons, and windows open anywhere.  The
decorations of the walls have been applied like a poultice, regardless of
the proportions of the rooms and the distribution of the spaces.

Building and decorating are, however, the best of educations.  The
husband, freed at last from his business occupations, finds in this new
study an interest and a charm unknown to him before.  He and his wife are
both vaguely disappointed when their resplendent mansion is finished,
having already outgrown it, and recognize that in spite of correct
detail, their costly apartments no more resemble the stately and simple
salons seen abroad than the cabin of a Fall River boat resembles the
_Galerie des Glaces_ at Versailles.  The humiliating knowledge that they
are all wrong breaks upon them, as it is doing on hundreds of others, at
the same time as the desire to know more and appreciate better the
perfect productions of this art.

A seventh and last step is before them but they know not how to make it.
A surer guide than the upholsterer is, they know, essential, but their
library contains nothing to help them.  Others possess the information
they need, yet they are ignorant where to turn for what they require.

With singular appropriateness a volume treating of this delightful "art"
has this season appeared at Scribner's.  "The Decoration of Houses" is
the result of a woman's faultless taste collaborating with a man's
technical knowledge.  Its mission is to reveal to the hundreds who have
advanced just far enough to find that they can go no farther alone,
truths lying concealed beneath the surface.  It teaches that consummate
taste is satisfied only with a perfected simplicity; that the facades of
a house must be the envelope of the rooms within and adapted to them, as
the rooms are to the habits and requirements of them "that dwell
therein;" that proportion is the backbone of the decorator's art and that
supreme elegance is fitness and moderation; and, above all, that an
attention to architectural principles can alone lead decoration to a
perfect development.




No. 13--Our Elite and Public Life


The complaint is so often heard, and seems so well founded, that there is
a growing inclination, not only among men of social position, but also
among our best and cleverest citizens, to stand aloof from public life,
and this reluctance on their part is so unfortunate, that one feels
impelled to seek out the causes where they must lie, beneath the surface.
At a first glance they are not apparent.  Why should not the honor of
representing one's town or locality be as eagerly sought after with us as
it is by English or French men of position?  That such is not the case,
however, is evident.

Speaking of this the other evening, over my after-dinner coffee, with a
high-minded and public-spirited gentleman, who not long ago represented
our country at a European court, he advanced two theories which struck me
as being well worth repeating, and which seemed to account to a certain
extent for this curious abstinence.

As a first and most important cause, he placed the fact that neither our
national nor (here in New York) our state capital coincides with our
metropolis.  In this we differ from England and all the continental
countries.  The result is not difficult to perceive.  In London, a man of
the world, a business man, or a great lawyer, who represents a locality
in Parliament, can fulfil his mandate and at the same time lead his usual
life among his own set.  The lawyer or the business man can follow during
the day his profession, or those affairs on which he depends to support
his family and his position in the world.  Then, after dinner (owing to
the peculiar hours adopted for the sittings of Parliament), he can take
his place as a law-maker.  If he be a London-born man, he in no way
changes his way of life or that of his family.  If, on the contrary, he
be a county magnate, the change he makes is all for the better, as it
takes him and his wife and daughters up to London, the haven of their
longings, and the centre of all sorts of social dissipations and
advancement.

With us, it is exactly the contrary.  As the District of Columbia elects
no one, everybody living in Washington officially is more or less
expatriated, and the social life it offers is a poor substitute for the
circle which most families leave to go there.

That, however, is not the most important side of the question.  Go to any
great lawyer of either New York or Chicago, and propose sending him to
Congress or the Senate.  His answer is sure to be, "I cannot afford it.  I
know it is an honor, but what is to replace the hundred thousand dollars
a year which my profession brings me in, not to mention that all my
practice would go to pieces during my absence?"  Or again, "How should I
dare to propose to my family to leave one of the great centres of the
country to go and vegetate in a little provincial city like Washington?
No, indeed!  Public life is out of the question for me!"

Does any one suppose England would have the class of men she gets in
Parliament, if that body sat at Bristol?

Until recently the man who occupied the position of Lord Chancellor made
thirty thousand pounds a year by his profession without interfering in
any way with his public duties, and at the present moment a recordership
in London in no wise prevents private practice.  Were these gentlemen
Americans, they would be obliged to renounce all hope of professional
income in order to serve their country at its Capital.

Let us glance for a moment at the other reason.  Owing to our laws
(doubtless perfectly reasonable, and which it is not my intention to
criticise,) a man must reside in the place he represents.  Here again we
differ from all other constitutional countries.  Unfortunately, our
clever young men leave the small towns of their birth and flock up to the
great centres as offering wider fields for their advancement.  In
consequence, the local elector finds his choice limited to what is
left--the intellectual skimmed milk, of which the cream has been carried
to New York or other big cities.  No country can exist without a
metropolis, and as such a centre by a natural law of assimilation absorbs
the best brains of the country, in other nations it has been found to the
interests of all parties to send down brilliant young men to the
"provinces," to be, in good time, returned by them to the national
assemblies.

As this is not a political article the simple indication of these two
causes will suffice, without entering into the question of their
reasonableness or of their justice.  The social bearing of such a
condition is here the only side of the question under discussion; it is
difficult to over-rate the influence that a man's family exert over his
decisions.

Political ambition is exceedingly rare among our women of position; when
the American husband is bitten with it, the wife submits to, rather than
abets, his inclinations.  In most cases our women are not cosmopolitan
enough to enjoy being transplanted far away from their friends and
relations, even to fill positions of importance and honor.  A New York
woman of great frankness and intelligence, who found herself recently in
a Western city under these circumstances, said, in answer to a flattering
remark that "the ladies of the place expected her to become their social
leader," "I don't see anything to lead," thus very plainly expressing her
opinion of the situation.  It is hardly fair to expect a woman accustomed
to the life of New York or the foreign capitals, to look forward with
enthusiasm to a term of years passed in Albany, or in Washington.

In France very much the same state of affairs has been reached by quite a
different route.  The aristocracy detest the present government, and it
is not considered "good form" by them to sit in the Chamber of Deputies
or to accept any but diplomatic positions.  They condescend to fill the
latter because that entails living away from their own country, as they
feel more at ease in foreign courts than at the Republican receptions of
the Elysee.

There is a deplorable tendency among our self-styled aristocracy to look
upon their circle as a class apart.  They separate themselves more each
year from the life of the country, and affect to smile at any of their
number who honestly wish to be of service to the nation.  They, like the
French aristocracy, are perfectly willing, even anxious, to fill
agreeable diplomatic posts at first-class foreign capitals, and are
naively astonished when their offers of service are not accepted with
gratitude by the authorities in Washington.  But let a husband propose to
his better half some humble position in the machinery of our government,
and see what the lady's answer will be.

The opinion prevails among a large class of our wealthy and cultivated
people, that to go into public life is to descend to duties beneath them.
They judge the men who occupy such positions with insulting severity,
classing them in their minds as corrupt and self-seeking, than which
nothing can be more childish or more imbecile.  Any observer who has
lived in the different grades of society will quickly renounce the
puerile idea that sporting or intellectual pursuits are alone worthy of a
gentleman's attention.  This very political life, which appears unworthy
of their attention to so many men, is, in reality, the great field where
the nations of the world fight out their differences, where the seed is
sown that will ripen later into vast crops of truth and justice.  It is
(if rightly regarded and honestly followed) the battle-ground where man's
highest qualities are put to their noblest use--that of working for the
happiness of others.




No. 14--The Small Summer Hotel


We certainly are the most eccentric race on the surface of the globe and
ought to be a delight to the soul of an explorer, so full is our
civilization of contradictions, unexplained habits and curious customs.
It is quite unnecessary for the inquisitive gentlemen who pass their time
prying into other people's affairs and then returning home to write books
about their discoveries, to risk their lives and digestions in long
journeys into Central Africa or to the frozen zones, while so much good
material lies ready to their hands in our own land.  The habits of the
"natives" in New England alone might occupy an active mind indefinitely,
offering as interesting problems as any to be solved by penetrating
Central Asia or visiting the man-eating tribes of Australia.

Perhaps one of our scientific celebrities, before undertaking his next
long voyage, will find time to make observations at home and collect
sufficient data to answer some questions that have long puzzled my
unscientific brain.  He would be doing good work.  Fame and honors await
the man who can explain why, for instance, sane Americans of the better
class, with money enough to choose their surroundings, should pass so
much of their time in hotels and boarding houses.  There must be a reason
for the vogue of these retreats--every action has a cause, however
remote.  I shall await with the deepest interest a paper on this subject
from one of our great explorers, untoward circumstances having some time
ago forced me to pass a few days in a popular establishment of this
class.

During my visit I amused myself by observing the inmates and trying to
discover why they had come there.  So far as I could find out, the
greater part of them belonged to our well-to-do class, and when at home
doubtless lived in luxurious houses and were waited on by trained
servants.  In the small summer hotel where I met them, they were living
in dreary little ten by twelve foot rooms, containing only the absolute
necessities of existence, a wash-stand, a bureau, two chairs and a bed.
And such a bed!  One mattress about four inches thick over squeaking
slats, cotton sheets, so nicely calculated to the size of the bed that
the slightest move on the part of the sleeper would detach them from
their moorings and undo the housemaid's work; two limp, discouraged
pillows that had evidently been "banting," and a few towels a foot long
with a surface like sand-paper, completed the fittings of the room.  Baths
were unknown, and hot water was a luxury distributed sparingly by a
capricious handmaiden.  It is only fair to add that everything in the
room was perfectly clean, as was the coarse table linen in the dining
room.

The meals were in harmony with the rooms and furniture, consisting only
of the strict necessities, cooked with a Spartan disregard for such
sybarite foibles as seasoning or dressing.  I believe there was a
substantial meal somewhere in the early morning hours, but I never
succeeded in getting down in time to inspect it.  By successful bribery,
I induced one of the village belles, who served at table, to bring a cup
of coffee to my room.  The first morning it appeared already poured out
in the cup, with sugar and cold milk added at her discretion.  At one
o'clock a dinner was served, consisting of soup (occasionally), one meat
dish and attendant vegetables, a meagre dessert, and nothing else.  At
half-past six there was an equally rudimentary meal, called "tea," after
which no further food was distributed to the inmates, who all, however,
seemed perfectly contented with this arrangement.  In fact they
apparently looked on the act of eating as a disagreeable task, to be
hurried through as soon as possible that they might return to their
aimless rocking and chattering.

Instead of dinner hour being the feature of the day, uniting people
around an attractive table, and attended by conversation, and the meal
lasting long enough for one's food to be properly eaten, it was rushed
through as though we were all trying to catch a train.  Then, when the
meal was over, the boarders relapsed into apathy again.

No one ever called this hospitable home a boarding-house, for the
proprietor was furious if it was given that name.  He also scorned the
idea of keeping a hotel.  So that I never quite understood in what
relation he stood toward us.  He certainly considered himself our host,
and ignored the financial side of the question severely.  In order not to
hurt his feelings by speaking to him of money, we were obliged to get our
bills by strategy from a male subordinate.  Mine host and his family were
apparently unaware that there were people under their roof who paid them
for board and lodging.  We were all looked upon as guests and
"entertained," and our rights impartially ignored.

Nothing, I find, is so distinctive of New England as this graceful
veiling of the practical side of life.  The landlady always reminded me,
by her manner, of Barrie's description of the bill-sticker's wife who
"cut" her husband when she chanced to meet him "professionally" engaged.
As a result of this extreme detachment from things material, the house
ran itself, or was run by incompetent Irish and negro "help."  There were
no bells in the rooms, which simplified the service, and nothing could be
ordered out of meal hours.

The material defects in board and lodging sink, however, into
insignificance before the moral and social unpleasantness of an
establishment such as this.  All ages, all conditions, and all creeds are
promiscuously huddled together.  It is impossible to choose whom one
shall know or whom avoid.  A horrible burlesque of family life is
enabled, with all its inconveniences and none of its sanctity.  People
from different cities, with different interests and standards, are
expected to "chum" together in an intimacy that begins with the eight
o'clock breakfast and ends only when all retire for the night.  No
privacy, no isolation is allowed.  If you take a book and begin to read
in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic
girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of
her affairs and the day's gossip.  There is no escape unless you mount to
your ten-by-twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they
visit Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other
conveniences.  Even such retirement is resented by the boarders.  You are
thought to be haughty and to give yourself airs if you do not sit for
twelve consecutive hours each day in unending conversation with them.

When one reflects that thousands of our countrymen pass at least one-half
of their lives in these asylums, and that thousands more in America know
no other homes, but move from one hotel to another, while the same outlay
would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings, it does seem as if these
modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-ouins," were gradually returning to
prehistoric habits and would end by eating roots promiscuously in caves.

The contradiction appears more marked the longer one reflects on the love
of independence and impatience of all restraint that characterize our
race.  If such an institution had been conceived by people of the Old
World, accustomed to moral slavery and to a thousand petty tyrannies, it
would not be so remarkable, but that we, of all the races of the earth,
should have created a form of torture unknown to Louis XI. or to the
Spanish Inquisitors, is indeed inexplicable!  Outside of this happy land
the institution is unknown.  The _pension_ when it exists abroad, is only
an exotic growth for an American market.  Among European nations it is
undreamed of; the poorest when they travel take furnished rooms, where
they are served in private, or go to restaurants or _table d'hotes_ for
their meals.  In a strictly continental hotel the public parlor does not
exist.  People do not travel to make acquaintances, but for health or
recreation, or to improve their minds.  The enforced intimacy of our
American family house, with its attendant quarrelling and back-biting, is
an infliction of which Europeans are in happy ignorance.

One explanation, only, occurs to me, which is that among New England
people, largely descended from Puritan stock, there still lingers some
blind impulse at self-mortification, an hereditary inclination to make
this life as disagreeable as possible by self-immolation.  Their
ancestors, we are told by Macaulay, suppressed bull baiting, not because
it hurt the bull, but because it gave pleasure to the people.  Here in
New England they refused the Roman dogma of Purgatory and then with
complete inconsistency, invented the boarding-house, in order, doubtless,
to take as much of the joy as possible out of this life, as a preparation
for endless bliss in the next.




No. 15--A False Start


Having had, during a wandering existence, many opportunities of observing
my compatriots away from home and familiar surroundings in various
circles of cosmopolitan society, at foreign courts, in diplomatic life,
or unofficial capacities, I am forced to acknowledge that whereas my
countrywoman invariably assumed her new position with grace and dignity,
my countryman, in the majority of cases, appeared at a disadvantage.

I take particular pleasure in making this tribute to my "sisters" tact
and wit, as I have been accused of being "hard" on American women, and
some half-humorous criticisms have been taken seriously by
over-susceptible women--doubtless troubled with guilty consciences for
nothing is more exact than the old French proverb, "It is only the truth
that wounds."

The fact remains clear, however, that American men, as regards polish,
facility in expressing themselves in foreign languages, the arts of
pleasing and entertaining, in short, the thousand and one nothings
composing that agreeable whole, a cultivated member of society, are
inferior to their womankind.  I feel sure that all Americans who have
travelled and have seen their compatriot in his social relations with
foreigners, will agree with this, reluctant as I am to acknowledge it.

That a sister and brother brought up together, under the same influences,
should later differ to this extent seems incredible.  It is just this
that convinces me we have made a false start as regards the education and
ambitions of our young men.

To find the reasons one has only to glance back at our past.  After the
struggle that insured our existence as a united nation, came a period of
great prosperity.  When both seemed secure, we did not pause and take
breath, as it were, before entering a new epoch of development, but
dashed ahead on the old lines.  It is here that we got on the wrong road.
Naturally enough too, for our peculiar position on this continent, far
away from the centres of cultivation and art, surrounded only by less
successful states with which to compare ourselves, has led us into
forming erroneous ideas as to the proportions of things, causing us to
exaggerate the value of material prosperity and undervalue matters of
infinitely greater importance, which have been neglected in consequence.

A man who, after fighting through our late war, had succeeded in amassing
a fortune, naturally wished his son to follow him on the only road in
which it had ever occurred to him that success was of any importance.  So
beyond giving the boy a college education, which he had not enjoyed, his
ambition rarely went; his idea being to make a practical business man of
him, or a lawyer, that he could keep the estate together more
intelligently.  In thousands of cases, of course, individual taste and
bent over-ruled this influence, and a career of science or art was
chosen; but in the mass of the American people, it was firmly implanted
that the pursuit of wealth was the only occupation to which a reasonable
human being could devote himself.  A young man who was not in some way
engaged in increasing his income was looked upon as a very undesirable
member of society, and sure, sooner or later, to come to harm.

Millionaires declined to send their sons to college, saying they would
get ideas there that would unfit them for business, to Paterfamilias the
one object of life.  Under such fostering influences, the ambitions in
our country have gradually given way to money standards and the false
start has been made!  Leaving aside at once the question of money in its
relation to our politics (although it would be a fruitful subject for
moralizing), and confining ourselves strictly to the social side of life,
we soon see the results of this mammon worship.

In England (although Englishmen have been contemptuously called the shop-
keepers of the world) the extension and maintenance of their vast empire
is the mainspring which keeps the great machine in movement.  And one
sees tens of thousands of well-born and delicately-bred men cheerfully
entering the many branches of public service where the hope of wealth can
never come, and retiring on pensions or half-pay in the strength of their
middle age, apparently without a regret or a thought beyond their
country's well-being.

In France, where the passionate love of their own land has made colonial
extension impossible, the modern Frenchman of education is more
interested in the yearly exhibition at the _Salon_ or in a successful
play at the _Francais_, than in the stock markets of the world.

Would that our young men had either of these bents!  They have copied
from England a certain love of sport, without the English climate or the
calm of country and garrison life, to make these sports logical and
necessary.  As the young American millionaire thinks he must go on
increasing his fortune, we see the anomaly of a man working through a
summer's day in Wall Street, then dashing in a train to some suburban
club, and appearing a half-hour later on the polo field.  Next to wealth,
sport has become the ambition of the wealthy classes, and has grown so
into our college life that the number of students in the freshman class
of our great universities is seriously influenced by that institution's
losses or gains at football.

What is the result of all this?  A young man starts in life with the firm
intention of making a great deal of money.  If he has any time left from
that occupation he will devote it to sport.  Later in life, when he has
leisure and travels, or is otherwise thrown with cultivated strangers, he
must naturally be at a disadvantage.  "Shop," he cannot talk; he knows
that is vulgar.  Music, art, the drama, and literature are closed books
to him, in spite of the fact that he may have a box on the grand tier at
the opera and a couple of dozen high-priced "masterpieces" hanging around
his drawing-rooms.  If he is of a finer clay than the general run of his
class, he will realize dimly that somehow the goal has been missed in his
life race.  His chase after the material has left him so little time to
cultivate the ideal, that he has prepared himself a sad and aimless old
age; unless he can find pleasure in doing as did a man I have been told
about, who, receiving half a dozen millions from his father's estate,
conceived the noble idea of increasing them so that he might leave to
each of his four children as much as he had himself received.  With the
strictest economy, and by suppressing out of his life and that of his
children all amusements and superfluous outlay, he has succeeded now for
many years in living on the income of his income.  Time will never hang
heavy on this Harpagon's hands.  He is a perfectly happy individual, but
his conversation is hardly of a kind to attract, and it may be doubted if
the rest of the family are as much to be envied.

An artist who had lived many years of his life in Paris and London was
speaking the other day of a curious phase he had remarked in our American
life.  He had been accustomed over there to have his studio the meeting-
place of friends, who would drop in to smoke and lounge away an hour,
chatting as he worked.  To his astonishment, he tells me that since he
has been in New York not one of the many men he knows has ever passed an
hour in his rooms.  Is not that a significant fact?  Another remark which
points its own moral was repeated to me recently.  A foreigner visiting
here, to whom American friends were showing the sights of our city,
exclaimed at last: "You have not pointed out to me any celebrities except
millionaires.  'Do you see that man? he is worth ten millions.  Look at
that house! it cost one million dollars, and there are pictures in it
worth over three million dollars.  That trotter cost one hundred thousand
dollars,' etc."  Was he not right?  And does it not give my reader a
shudder to see in black and white the phrases that are, nevertheless, so
often on our lips?

This levelling of everything to its cash value is so ingrained in us that
we are unconscious of it, as we are of using slang or local expressions
until our attention is called to them.  I was present once at a farce
played in a London theatre, where the audience went into roars of
laughter every time the stage American said, "Why, certainly."  I was
indignant, and began explaining to my English friend that we never used
such an absurd phrase.  "Are you sure?" he asked.  "Why, certainly," I
said, and stopped, catching the twinkle in his eye.

It is very much the same thing with money.  We do not notice how often it
slips into the conversation.  "Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth
speaketh."  Talk to an American of a painter and the charm of his work.
He will be sure to ask, "Do his pictures sell well?" and will lose all
interest if you say he can't sell them at all.  As if that had anything
to do with it!

Remembering the well-known anecdote of Schopenhauer and the gold piece
which he used to put beside his plate at the _table d'hote_, where he
ate, surrounded by the young officers of the German army, and which was
to be given to the poor the first time he heard any conversation that was
not about promotion or women, I have been tempted to try the experiment
in our clubs, changing the subjects to stocks and sport, and feel
confident that my contributions to charity would not ruin me.

All this has had the result of making our men dull companions; after
dinner, or at a country house, if the subject they love is tabooed, they
talk of nothing!  It is sad for a rich man (unless his mind has remained
entirely between the leaves of his ledger) to realize that money really
buys very little, and above a certain amount can give no satisfaction in
proportion to its bulk, beyond that delight which comes from a sense of
possession.  Croesus often discovers as he grows old that he has
neglected to provide himself with the only thing that "is a joy for
ever"--a cultivated intellect--in order to amass a fortune that turns to
ashes, when he has time to ask of it any of the pleasures and resources
he fondly imagined it would afford him.  Like Talleyrand's young man who
would not learn whist, he finds that he has prepared for himself a
dreadful old age!




No. 16--A Holy Land


Not long ago an article came under my notice descriptive of the
neighborhood around Grant's tomb and the calm that midsummer brings to
that vicinity, laughingly referred to as the "Holy Land."

As careless fingers wandering over the strings of a violin may
unintentionally strike a chord, so the writer of those lines, all
unconsciously, with a jest, set vibrating a world of tender memories and
associations; for the region spoken of is truly a holy land to me, the
playground of my youth, and connected with the sweetest ties that can
bind one's thoughts to the past.

Ernest Renan in his _Souvenirs d'Enfance_, tells of a Brittany legend,
firmly believed in that wild land, of the vanished city of "Is," which
ages ago disappeared beneath the waves.  The peasants still point out at
a certain place on the coast the site of the fabled city, and the
fishermen tell how during great storms they have caught glimpses of its
belfries and ramparts far down between the waves; and assert that on calm
summer nights they can hear the bells chiming up from those depths.  I
also have a vanished "Is" in my heart, and as I grow older, I love to
listen to the murmurs that float up from the past.  They seem to come
from an infinite distance, almost like echoes from another life.

At that enchanted time we lived during the summers in an old wooden house
my father had re-arranged into a fairly comfortable dwelling.  A
tradition, which no one had ever taken the trouble to verify, averred
that Washington had once lived there, which made that hero very real to
us.  The picturesque old house stood high on a slope where the land rises
boldly; with an admirable view of distant mountain, river and opposing
Palisades.

The new Riverside drive (which, by the bye, should make us very lenient
toward the men who robbed our city a score of years ago, for they left us
that vast work in atonement), has so changed the neighborhood it is
impossible now for pious feet to make a pilgrimage to those childish
shrines.  One house, however, still stands as when it was our nearest
neighbor.  It had sheltered General Gage, land for many acres around had
belonged to him.  He was an enthusiastic gardener, and imported, among a
hundred other fruits and plants, the "Queen Claude" plum from France,
which was successfully acclimated on his farm.  In New York a plum of
that kind is still called a "green gage."  The house has changed hands
many times since we used to play around the Grecian pillars of its
portico.  A recent owner, dissatisfied doubtless with its classic
simplicity, has painted it a cheerful mustard color and crowned it with a
fine new _Mansard_ roof.  Thus disfigured, and shorn of its surrounding
trees, the poor old house stands blankly by the roadside, reminding one
of the Greek statue in Anstey's "Painted Venus" after the London barber
had decorated her to his taste.  When driving by there now, I close my
eyes.

Another house, where we used to be taken to play, was that of Audubon, in
the park of that name.  Many a rainy afternoon I have passed with his
children choosing our favorite birds in the glass cases that filled every
nook and corner of the tumble-down old place, or turning over the leaves
of the enormous volumes he would so graciously take down from their
places for our amusement.  I often wonder what has become of those vast
_in-folios_, and if any one ever opens them now and admires as we did the
glowing colored plates in which the old ornithologist took such pride.
There is something infinitely sad in the idea of a collection of books
slowly gathered together at the price of privations and sacrifices,
cherished, fondled, lovingly read, and then at the owner's death, coldly
sent away to stand for ever unopened on the shelves of some public
library.  It is like neglecting poor dumb children!

An event that made a profound impression on my childish imagination
occurred while my father, who was never tired of improving our little
domain, was cutting a pathway down the steep side of the slope to the
river.  A great slab, dislodged by a workman's pick, fell disclosing the
grave of an Indian chief.  In a low archway or shallow cave sat the
skeleton of the chieftain, his bows and arrows arranged around him on the
ground, mingled with fragments of an elaborate costume, of which little
remained but the bead-work.  That it was the tomb of a man great among
his people was evident from the care with which the grave had been
prepared and then hidden, proving how, hundreds of years before our
civilization, another race had chosen this noble cliff and stately river
landscape as the fitting framework for a great warrior's tomb.

This discovery made no little stir in the scientific world of that day.
Hundreds came to see it, and as photography had not then come into the
world, many drawings were made and casts taken, and finally the whole
thing was removed to the rooms of the Historical Society.  From that day
the lonely little path held an awful charm for us.  Our childish readings
of Cooper had developed in us that love of the Indian and his wild life,
so characteristic of boyhood thirty years ago.  On still summer
afternoons, the place had a primeval calm that froze the young blood in
our veins.  Although we prided ourselves on our quality as "braves," and
secretly pined to be led on the war-path, we were shy of walking in that
vicinity in daylight, and no power on earth, not even the offer of the
tomahawk or snow-shoes for which our souls longed, would have taken us
there at night.

A place connected in my memory with a tragic association was across the
river on the last southern slope of the Palisades.  Here we stood
breathless while my father told the brief story of the duel between Burr
and Hamilton, and showed us the rock stained by the younger man's life-
blood.  In those days there was a simple iron railing around the spot
where Hamilton had expired, but of later years I have been unable to find
any trace of the place.  The tide of immigration has brought so deep a
deposit of "saloons" and suburban "balls" that the very face of the land
is changed, old lovers of that shore know it no more.  Never were the
environs of a city so wantonly and recklessly degraded.  Municipalities
have vied with millionaires in soiling and debasing the exquisite shores
of our river, that, thirty years ago, were unrivalled the world over.

The glamour of the past still lies for me upon this landscape in spite of
its many defacements.  The river whispers of boyish boating parties, and
the woods recall a thousand childish hopes and fears, resolute departures
to join the pirates, or the red men in their strongholds--journeys boldly
carried out until twilight cooled our courage and the supper-hour proved
a stronger temptation than war and carnage.

When I sat down this summer evening to write a few lines about happy days
on the banks of the Hudson, I hardly realized how sweet those memories
were to me.  The rewriting of the old names has evoked from their long
sleep so many loved faces.  Arms seem reaching out to me from the past.
The house is very still to-night.  I seem to be nearer my loved dead than
to the living.  The bells of my lost "Is" are ringing clear in the
silence.




No. 17--Royalty At Play


Few more amusing sights are to be seen in these days, than that of
crowned heads running away from their dull old courts and functions,
roughing it in hotels and villas, gambling, yachting and playing at being
rich nobodies.  With much intelligence they have all chosen the same
Republican playground, where visits cannot possibly be twisted into
meaning any new "combination" or political move, thus assuring themselves
the freedom from care or responsibility, that seems to be the aim of
their existence.  Alongside of well-to-do Royalties in good paying
situations, are those out of a job, who are looking about for a "place."
One cannot take an afternoon's ramble anywhere between Cannes and Mentone
without meeting a half-dozen of these magnates.

The other day, in one short walk, I ran across three Empresses, two
Queens, and an Heir-apparent, and then fled to my hotel, fearing to be
unfitted for America, if I went on "keeping such company."  They are
knowing enough, these wandering great ones, and after trying many places
have hit on this charming coast as offering more than any other for their
comfort and enjoyment.  The vogue of these sunny shores dates from their
annexation to France,--a price Victor Emmanuel reluctantly paid for
French help in his war with Austria.  Napoleon III.'s demand for Savoy
and this littoral, was first made known to Victor Emmanuel at a state
ball at Genoa.  Savoy was his birthplace and his home!  The King broke
into a wild temper, cursing the French Emperor and making insulting
allusions to his parentage, saying he had not one drop of Bonaparte blood
in his veins.  The King's frightened courtiers tried to stop this
outburst, showing him the French Ambassador at his elbow.  With a
superhuman effort Victor Emmanuel controlled himself, and turning to the
Ambassador, said:

"I fear my tongue ran away with me!"  With a smile and a bow the great
French diplomatist remarked:

"_Sire_, I am so deaf I have not heard a word your Majesty has been
saying!"

The fashion of coming to the Riviera for health or for amusement, dates
from the sixties, when the Empress of Russia passed a winter at Nice, as
a last attempt to prolong the existence of the dying Tsarewitsch, her
son.  There also the next season the Duke of Edinburgh wooed and won her
daughter (then the greatest heiress in Europe) for his bride.  The world
moves fast and a journey it required a matter of life and death to decide
on, then, is gayly undertaken now, that a prince may race a yacht, or a
princess try her luck at the gambling tables.  When one reflects that the
"royal caste," in Europe alone, numbers some eight hundred people, and
that the East is beginning to send out its more enterprising crowned
heads to get a taste of the fun, that beyond drawing their salaries,
these good people have absolutely nothing to do, except to amuse
themselves, it is no wonder that this happy land is crowded with royal
pleasure-seekers.

After a try at Florence and Aix, "the Queen" has been faithful to Cimiez,
a charming site back of Nice.  That gay city is always _en fete_ the day
she arrives, as her carriages pass surrounded by French cavalry, one can
catch a glimpse of her big face, and dowdy little figure, which
nevertheless she can make so dignified when occasion requires.  The stay
here is, indeed, a holiday for this record-breaking sovereign, who
potters about her private grounds of a morning in a donkey-chair, sunning
herself and watching her Battenberg grandchildren at play.  In the
afternoon, she drives a couple of hours--in an open carriage--one
outrider in black livery alone distinguishing her turnout from the
others.

The Prince of Wales makes his headquarters at Cannes where he has poor
luck in sailing the Brittania, for which he consoles himself with jolly
dinners at Monte Carlo.  You can see him almost any evening in the
_Restaurant de Paris_, surrounded by his own particular set,--the Duchess
of Devonshire (who started a penniless German officer's daughter, and
became twice a duchess); Lady de Grey and Lady Wolverton, both showing
near six feet of slender English beauty; at their side, and lovelier than
either, the Countess of Essex.  The husbands of these "Merry Wives" are
absent, but do not seem to be missed, as the ladies sit smoking and
laughing over their coffee, the party only breaking up towards eleven
o'clock to try its luck at _trente et quarante_, until a "special" takes
them back to Cannes.

He is getting sadly old and fat, is England's heir, the likeness to his
mamma becoming more marked each year.  His voice, too, is oddly like
hers, deep and guttural, more adapted to the paternal German (which all
this family speak when alone) than to his native English.  Hair, he has
none, except a little fringe across the back of his head, just above a
fine large roll of fat that blushes above his shirt-collar.  Too bad that
this discovery of the microbe of baldness comes rather late for him!  He
has a pleasant twinkle in his small eyes, and an entire absence of
_pose_, that accounts largely for his immense and enduring popularity.

But the Hotel Cap Martin shelters quieter crowned heads.  The Emperor and
Empress of Austria, who tramp about the hilly roads, the King and Queen
of Saxony and the fat Arch-duchess Stephanie.  Austria's Empress looks
sadly changed and ill, as does another lady of whom one can occasionally
catch a glimpse, walking painfully with a crutch-stick in the shadow of
the trees near her villa.  It is hard to believe that this white-haired,
bent old woman was once the imperial beauty who from the salons of the
Tuileries dictated the fashions of the world!  Few have paid so dearly
for their brief hour of splendor!

Cannes with its excellent harbor is the centre of interest during the
racing season when the Tsarewitsch comes on his yacht Czaritza.  At the
Battle of Flowers, one is pretty sure to see the Duke of Cambridge, his
Imperial Highness, the Grand Duke Michael, Prince Christian of Denmark,
H.R.H. the Duke of Nassau, H.I.H. the Archduke Ferdinand d'Este, their
Serene Highnesses of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas,
also H.I.H. Marie Valerie and the Schleswig-Holsteins, pelting each other
and the public with _confetti_ and flowers.  Indeed, half the _Almanach
de Gotha_, that continental "society list," seems to be sunning itself
here and forgetting its cares, on bicycles or on board yachts.  It is
said that the Crown Princess of Honolulu (whoever she may be) honors
Mentone with her presence, and the newly deposed Queen "Ranavalo" of
Madagascar is _en route_ to join in the fun.

This crowd of royalty reminds me of a story the old sea-dogs who gather
about the "Admirals' corner" of the Metropolitan Club in Washington, love
to tell you.  An American cockswain, dazzled by a doubly royal visit,
with attending suites, on board the old "Constitution," came up to his
commanding officer and touching his cap, said:

"Beg pardon, Admiral, but one of them kings has tumbled down the gangway
and broke his leg."

It has become a much more amusing thing to wear a crown than it was.
Times have changed indeed since Marie Laczinska lived the fifty lonely
years of her wedded life and bore her many children, in one bed-room at
Versailles--a monotony only broken by visits to Fontainebleau or Marly.
Shakespeare's line no longer fits the case.

Beyond securing rich matches for their children, and keeping a sharp
lookout that the Radicals at home do not unduly cut down their civil
lists, these great ones have little but their amusements to occupy them.
Do they ever reflect, as they rush about visiting each other and
squabbling over precedence when they meet, that some fine morning the tax-
payers may wake up, and ask each other why they are being crushed under
such heavy loads, that eight hundred or more quite useless people may
pass their lives in foreign watering-places, away from their homes and
their duties?  It will be a bad day for them when the long-suffering
subjects say to them, "Since we get on so exceedingly well during your
many visits abroad, we think we will try how it will work without you at
all!"

The Prince of little Monaco seems to be about the only one up to the
situation, for he at least stays at home, and in connection with two
other gentlemen runs an exceedingly good hotel and several restaurants on
his estates, doing all he can to attract money into the place, while
making the strictest laws to prevent his subjects gambling at the famous
tables.  Now if other royalties instead of amusing themselves all the
year round would go in for something practical like this, they might
become useful members of the community.  This idea of Monaco's Prince
strikes one as most timely, and as opening a career for other indigent
crowned heads.  Hotels are getting so good and so numerous, that without
some especial "attraction" a new one can hardly succeed; but a
"Hohenzollern House" well situated in Berlin, with William II. to receive
the tourists at the door, and his fat wife at the desk, would be sure to
prosper.  It certainly would be pleasanter for him to spend money so
honestly earned than the millions wrested from half-starving peasants
which form his present income.  Besides there is almost as much gold lace
on a hotel employee's livery as on a court costume!

The numerous crowned heads one meets wandering about, can hardly lull
themselves over their "games" with the flattering unction that they are
of use, for, have they not France before them (which they find so much to
their taste) stronger, richer, more respected than ever since she shook
herself free of such incumbrances?  Not to mention our own democratic
country, which has managed to hold its own, in spite of their many
gleeful predictions to the contrary.




No. 18--A Rock Ahead


Having had occasion several times during this past season, to pass by the
larger stores in the vicinity of Twenty-third Street, I have been struck
more than ever, by the endless flow of womankind that beats against the
doors of those establishments.  If they were temples where a beneficent
deity was distributing health, learning, and all the good things of
existence, the rush could hardly have been greater.  It saddened me to
realize that each of the eager women I saw was, on the contrary,
dispensing something of her strength and brain, as well as the wearily
earned stipend of the men of her family (if not her own), for what could
be of little profit to her.

It occurred to me that, if the people who are so quick to talk about the
elevating and refining influences of women, could take an hour or two and
inspect the centres in question, they might not be so firm in their
beliefs.  For, reluctant as I am to acknowledge it, the one great
misfortune in this country, is the unnatural position which has been
(from some mistaken idea of chivalry) accorded to women here.  The result
of placing them on this pedestal, and treating them as things apart, has
been to make women in America poorer helpmeets to their husbands than in
any other country on the face of the globe, civilized or uncivilized.

Strange as it may appear, this is not confined to the rich, but permeates
all classes, becoming more harmful in descending the social scale, and it
will bring about a disintegration of our society, sooner than could be
believed.  The saying on which we have all been brought up, viz., that
you can gauge the point of civilization attained in a nation by the
position it accords to woman, was quite true as long as woman was
considered man's inferior.  To make her his equal was perfectly just; all
the trouble begins when you attempt to make her man's superior, a
something apart from his working life, and not the companion of his
troubles and cares, as she was intended to be.

When a small shopkeeper in Europe marries, the next day you will see his
young wife taking her place at the desk in his shop.  While he serves his
customers, his smiling spouse keeps the books, makes change, and has an
eye on the employees.  At noon they dine together; in the evening, after
the shop is closed, are pleased or saddened together over the results of
the day.  The wife's _dot_ almost always goes into the business, so that
there is a community of interest to unite them, and their lives are
passed together.  In this country, what happens?  The husband places his
new wife in a small house, or in two or three furnished rooms, generally
so far away that all idea of dining with her is impossible.  In
consequence, he has a "quick lunch" down town, and does not see his wife
between eight o'clock in the morning and seven in the evening.  His
business is a closed book to her, in which she can have no interest, for
her weary husband naturally revolts from talking "shop," even if she is
in a position to understand him.

His false sense of shielding her from the rude world makes him keep his
troubles to himself, so she rarely knows his financial position and sulks
over his "meanness" to her, in regard to pin-money; and being a perfectly
idle person, her days are apt to be passed in a way especially devised by
Satan for unoccupied hands.  She has learned no cooking from her mother;
"going to market" has become a thing of the past.  So she falls a victim
to the allurements of the bargain-counter; returning home after hours of
aimless wandering, irritable and aggrieved because she cannot own the
beautiful things she has seen.  She passes the evening in trying to win
her husband's consent to some purchase he knows he cannot afford, while
it breaks his heart to refuse her--some object, which, were she really
his companion, she would not have had the time to see or the folly to ask
for.

The janitor in our building is truly a toiler.  He rarely leaves his
dismal quarters under the sidewalk, but "Madam" walks the streets clad in
sealskin and silk, a "Gainsborough" crowning her false "bang."  I always
think of Max O'Rell's clever saying, when I see her: "The sweat of the
American husband crystallizes into diamond ear-rings for the American
woman."  My janitress sports a diminutive pair of those jewels and has
hopes of larger ones!  Instead of "doing" the bachelor's rooms in the
building as her husband's helpmeet, she "does" her spouse, and a char-
woman works for her.  She is one of the drops in the tide that ebbs and
flows on Twenty-third Street--a discontented woman placed in a false
position by our absurd customs.

Go a little further up in the social scale and you will find the same
"detached" feeling.  In a household I know of only one horse and a
_coupe_ can be afforded.  Do you suppose it is for the use of the weary
breadwinner?  Not at all.  He walks from his home to the "elevated."  The
carriage is to take his wife to teas or the park.  In a year or two she
will go abroad, leaving him alone to turn the crank that produces the
income.  As it is, she always leaves him for six months each year in a
half-closed house, to the tender mercies of a caretaker.  Two additional
words could be advantageously added to the wedding service.  After "for
richer for poorer," I should like to hear a bride promise to cling to her
husband "for winter for summer!"

Make another step up and stand in the entrance of a house at two A.M.,
just as the cotillion is commencing, and watch the couples leaving.  The
husband, who has been in Wall Street all day, knows that he must be there
again at nine next morning.  He is furious at the lateness of the hour,
and dropping with fatigue.  His wife, who has done nothing to weary her,
is equally enraged to be taken away just as the ball was becoming
amusing.  What a happy, united pair they are as the footman closes the
door and the carriage rolls off home!  Who is to blame?  The husband is
vainly trying to lead the most exacting of double lives, that of a
business man all day and a society man all night.  You can pick him out
at a glance in a ballroom.  His eye shows you that there is no rest for
him, for he has placed his wife at the head of an establishment whose
working crushes him into the mud of care and anxiety.  Has he any one to
blame but himself?

In England, I am told, the man of a family goes up to London in the
spring and gets his complete outfit, down to the smallest details of hat-
box and umbrella.  If there happens to be money left, the wife gets a new
gown or two: if not, she "turns" the old ones and rejoices vicariously in
the splendor of her "lord."  I know one charming little home over there,
where the ladies cannot afford a pony-carriage, because the three
indispensable hunters eat up the where-withal.

Thackeray was delighted to find one household (Major Ponto's) where the
governess ruled supreme, and I feel a fiendish pleasure in these accounts
of a country where men have been able to maintain some rights, and am
moved to preach a crusade for the liberation of the American husband,
that the poor, down-trodden creature may revolt from the slavery where he
is held and once more claim his birthright.  If he be prompt to act (and
is successful) he may work such a reform that our girls, on marrying, may
feel that some duties and responsibilities go with their new positions;
and a state of things be changed, where it is possible for a woman to be
pitied by her friends as a model of abnegation, because she has decided
to remain in town during the summer to keep her husband company and make
his weary home-coming brighter.  Or where (as in a story recently heard)
a foreigner on being presented to an American bride abroad and asking for
her husband, could hear in answer: "Oh, he could not come; he was too
busy.  I am making my wedding-trip without him."




No. 19--The Grand Prix


In most cities, it is impossible to say when the "season" ends.  In
London and with us in New York it dwindles off without any special
finish, but in Paris it closes like a trap-door, or the curtain on the
last scene of a pantomime, while the lights are blazing and the orchestra
is banging its loudest.  The _Grand Prix_, which takes place on the
second Sunday in June, is the climax of the spring gayeties.  Up to that
date, the social pace has been getting faster and faster, like the finish
of the big race itself, and fortunately for the lives of the women as
well as the horses, ends as suddenly.

In 1897, the last steeple chase at Auteuil, which precedes the _Grand
Prix_ by one week, was won by a horse belonging to an actress of the
_Theatre Francais_, a lady who has been a great deal before the public
already in connection with the life and death of young Lebaudy.  This
youth having had the misfortune to inherit an enormous fortune, while
still a mere boy, plunged into the wildest dissipation, and became the
prey of a band of sharpers and blacklegs.  Mlle. Marie Louise Marsy
appears to have been the one person who had a sincere affection for the
unfortunate youth.  When his health gave way during his military service,
she threw over her engagement with the _Francais_, and nursed her lover
until his death--a devotion rewarded by the gift of a million.

At the present moment, four or five of the band of self-styled noblemen
who traded on the boy's inexperience and generosity, are serving out
terms in the state prisons for blackmailing, and the _Theatre Francais_
possesses the anomaly of a young and beautiful actress, who runs a racing
stable in her own name.

The _Grand Prix_ dates from the reign of Napoleon III., who, at the
suggestion of the great railway companies, inaugurated this race in 1862,
in imitation of the English Derby, as a means of attracting people to
Paris.  The city and the railways each give half of the forty-thousand-
dollar prize.  It is the great official race of the year.  The President
occupies the central pavilion, surrounded by the members of the cabinet
and the diplomatic corps.  On the tribunes and lawn can be seen the _Tout
Paris_--all the celebrities of the great and half-world who play such an
important part in the life of France's capital.  The whole colony of the
_Rastaquoueres_, is sure to be there, "_Rastas_," as they are familiarly
called by the Parisians, who make little if any distinction in their
minds between a South American (blazing in diamonds and vulgar clothes)
and our own select (?) colony.  Apropos of this inability of the
Europeans to appreciate our fine social distinctions, I have been told of
a well-born New Yorker who took a French noblewoman rather to task for
receiving an American she thought unworthy of notice, and said:

"How can you receive her?  Her husband keeps a hotel!"

"Is that any reason?" asked the French-woman; "I thought all Americans
kept hotels."

For the _Grand Prix_, every woman not absolutely bankrupt has a new
costume, her one idea being a _creation_ that will attract attention and
eclipse her rivals.  The dressmakers have had a busy time of it for weeks
before.

Every horse that can stand up is pressed into service for the day.  For
twenty-four hours before, the whole city is _en fete_, and Paris _en
fete_ is always a sight worth seeing.  The natural gayety of the
Parisians, a characteristic noticed (if we are to believe the historians)
as far back as the conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, breaks out in all
its amusing spontaneity.  If the day is fine, the entire population gives
itself up to amusement.  From early morning the current sets towards the
charming corner of the Bois where the Longchamps race-course lies,
picturesquely encircled by the Seine (alive with a thousand boats), and
backed by the woody slopes of Suresnes and St. Cloud.  By noon every
corner and vantage point of the landscape is seized upon, when, with a
blare of trumpets and the rattle of cavalry, the President arrives in his
turnout _a la Daumont_, two postilions in blue and gold, and a _piqueur_,
preceded by a detachment of the showy _Gardes Republicains_ on horseback,
and takes his place in the little pavilion where for so many years
Eugenie used to sit in state, and which has sheltered so many crowned
heads under its simple roof.  Faure's arrival is the signal for the
racing to begin, from that moment the interest goes on increasing until
the great "event."  Then in an instant the vast throng of human beings
breaks up and flows homeward across the Bois, filling the big Place
around the Arc de Triomphe, rolling down the Champs Elysees, in twenty
parallel lines of carriages.  The sidewalks are filled with a laughing,
singing, uproarious crowd that quickly invades every restaurant, _cafe_,
or chop-house until their little tables overflow on to the grass and side-
walks, and even into the middle of the streets.  Later in the evening the
open-air concerts and theatres are packed, and every little square
organizes its impromptu ball, the musicians mounted on tables, and the
crowd dancing gayly on the wooden pavement until daybreak.

The next day, Paris becomes from a fashionable point of view,
"impossible."  If you walk through the richer quarters, you will see only
long lines of closed windows.  The approaches to the railway stations are
blocked with cabs piled with trunks and bicycles.  The "great world" is
fleeing to the seashore or its _chateaux_, and Paris will know it no more
until January, for the French are a country-loving race, and since there
has been no court, the aristocracy pass longer and longer periods on
their own estates each year, partly from choice and largely to show their
disdain for the republic and its entertainments.

The shady drives in the park, which only a day or two ago were so
brilliant with smart traps and spring toilets, are become a cool
wilderness, where will meet, perhaps, a few maiden ladies exercising fat
dogs, uninterrupted except by the watering-cart or by a few stray
tourists in cabs.  Now comes a delightful time for the real amateur of
Paris and the country around, which is full of charming corners where one
can dine at quiet little restaurants, overhanging the water or buried
among trees.  You are sure of getting the best of attention from the
waiters, and the dishes you order receive all the cook's attention.  Of
an evening the Bois is alive with a myriad of bicycles, their lights
twinkling among the trees like many-colored fire-flies.  To any one who
knows how to live there, Paris is at its best in the last half of June
and July.  Nevertheless, in a couple of days there will not be an
American in Paris, London being the objective point; for we love to be
"in at the death," and a coronation, a musical festival, or a big race is
sure to attract all our floating population.

The Americans who have the hardest time in Paris are those who try to
"run with the deer and hunt with the hounds," as the French proverb has
it, who would fain serve God and Mammon.  As anything especially amusing
is sure to take place on Sunday in this wicked capital, our friends go
through agonies of indecision, their consciences pulling one way, their
desire to amuse themselves the other.  Some find a middle course, it
seems, for yesterday this conversation was overheard on the steps of the
American Church:

_First American Lady_: "Are you going to stop for the sermon?"

_Second American Lady_: "I am so sorry I can't, but the races begin at
one!"




No. 20--"The Treadmill."


A half-humorous, half-pathetic epistle has been sent to me by a woman,
who explains in it her particular perplexity.  Such letters are the
windfalls of our profession!  For what is more attractive than to have a
woman take you for her lay confessor, to whom she comes for advice in
trouble? opening her innocent heart for your inspection!

My correspondent complains that her days are not sufficiently long, nor
is her strength great enough, for the thousand and one duties and
obligations imposed upon her.  "If," she says, "a woman has friends and a
small place in the world--and who has not in these days?--she must golf
or 'bike' or skate a bit, of a morning; then she is apt to lunch out, or
have a friend or two in, to that meal.  After luncheon there is sure to
be a 'class' of some kind that she has foolishly joined, or a charity
meeting, matinee, or reception; but above all, there are her 'duty'
calls.  She must be home at five to make tea, that she has promised her
men friends, and they will not leave until it is time for her to dress
for dinner, 'out' or at home, with often the opera, a supper, or a ball
to follow.  It is quite impossible," she adds, "under these circumstances
to apply one's self to anything serious, to read a book or even open a
periodical.  The most one can accomplish is a glance at a paper."

Indeed, it would require an exceptional constitution to carry out the
above programme, not to mention the attention that a woman must (however
reluctantly) give to her house and her family.  Where are the quiet hours
to be found for self-culture, the perusal of a favorite author, or,
perhaps, a little timid "writing" on her own account?  Nor does this
treadmill round fill a few months only of her life.  With slight
variations of scene and costume, it continues through the year.

A painter, I know, was fortunate enough to receive, a year or two ago,
the commission to paint a well-known beauty.  He was delighted with the
idea and convinced that he could make her portrait the best work of his
life, one that would be the stepping-stone to fame and fortune.  This was
in the spring.  He was naturally burning to begin at once, but found to
his dismay that the lady was just about starting for Europe.  So he
waited, and at her suggestion installed himself a couple of months later
at the seaside city where she had a cottage.  No one could be more
charming than she was, inviting him to dine and drive daily, but when he
broached the subject of "sitting," was "too busy just that day."  Later
in the autumn she would be quite at his disposal.  In the autumn,
however, she was visiting, never ten days in the same place.  Early
winter found her "getting her house in order," a mysterious rite
apparently attended with vast worry and fatigue.  With cooling
enthusiasm, the painter called and coaxed and waited.  November brought
the opera and the full swing of a New York season.  So far she has given
him half a dozen sittings, squeezed in between a luncheon, which made her
"unavoidably late," for which she is charmingly "sorry," and a reception
that she was forced to attend, although "it breaks my heart to leave just
as you are beginning to work so well, but I really must, or the tiresome
old cat who is giving the tea will be saying all sorts of unpleasant
things about me."  So she flits off, leaving the poor, disillusioned
painter before his canvas, knowing now that his dream is over, that in a
month or two his pretty sitter will be off again to New Orleans for the
carnival, or abroad, and that his weary round of waiting will recommence.
He will be fortunate if some day it does not float back to him, in the
mysterious way disagreeable things do come to one, that she has been
heard to say, "I fear dear Mr. Palette is not very clever, for I have
been sitting to him for over a year, and he has really done nothing yet."

He has been simply the victim of a state of affairs that neither of them
were strong enough to break through.  It never entered into Beauty's head
that she could lead a life different from her friends.  She was honestly
anxious to have a successful portrait of herself, but the sacrifice of
any of her habits was more than she could make.

Who among my readers (and I am tempted to believe they are all more
sensible than the above young woman) has not, during a summer passed with
agreeable friends, made a thousand pleasant little plans with them for
the ensuing winter,--the books they were to read at the same time, the
"exhibitions" they were to see, the visits to our wonderful collections
in the Metropolitan Museum or private galleries, cosy little dinners,
etc.?  And who has not found, as the winter slips away, that few of these
charming plans have been carried out?  He and his friends have
unconsciously fallen back into their ruts of former years, and the
pleasant things projected have been brushed aside by that strongest of
tyrants, habit.

I once asked a very great lady, whose gracious manner was never
disturbed, who floated through the endless complications of her life with
smiling serenity, how she achieved this Olympian calm.  She was good
enough to explain.  "I make a list of what I want to do each day.  Then,
as I find my day passing, or I get behind, or tired, I throw over every
other engagement.  I could have done them all with hurry and fatigue.  I
prefer to do one-half and enjoy what I do.  If I go to a house, it is to
remain and appreciate whatever entertainment has been prepared for me.  I
never offer to any hostess the slight of a hurried, _distrait_ 'call,'
with glances at my watch, and an 'on-the-wing' manner.  It is much easier
not to go, or to send a card."

This brings me around to a subject which I believe is one of the causes
of my correspondent's dilemma.  I fear that she never can refuse
anything.  It is a peculiar trait of people who go about to amuse
themselves, that they are always sure the particular entertainment they
have been asked to last is going to "be amusing."  It rarely is different
from the others, but these people are convinced, that to stay away would
be to miss something.  A weary-looking girl about 1 A.M. (at a
house-party) when asked why she did not go to bed if she was so tired,
answered, "the nights I go to bed early, they always seem to do something
jolly, and then I miss it."

There is no greater proof of how much this weary round wears on women
than the acts of the few who feel themselves strong enough in their
position to defy custom.  They have thrown off the yoke (at least the
younger ones have) doubtless backed up by their husbands, for men are
much quicker to see the aimlessness of this stupid social routine.  First
they broke down the great New-Year-call "grind."  Men over forty
doubtless recall with a shudder, that awful custom which compelled a man
to get into his dress clothes at ten A.M., and pass his day rushing about
from house to house like a postman.  Out-of-town clubs and sport helped
to do away with that remnant of New Amsterdam.  Next came the male revolt
from the afternoon "tea" or "musical."  A black coat is rare now at
either of these functions, or if seen is pretty sure to be on a back over
fifty.  Next, we lords of creation refused to call at all, or leave our
cards.  A married woman now leaves her husband's card with her own, and
sisters leave the "pasteboard" of their brothers and often those of their
brothers' friends.  Any combination is good enough to "shoot a card."

In London the men have gone a step further.  It is not uncommon to hear a
young man boast that he never owned a visiting card or made a "duty" call
in his life.  Neither there nor with us does a man count as a "call" a
quiet cup of tea with a woman he likes, and a cigarette and quiet talk
until dressing time.  Let the young women have courage and take matters
into their own hands.  (The older ones are hopeless and will go on
pushing this Juggernaut car over each other's weary bodies, until the end
of the chapter.)  Let them have the courage occasionally to "refuse"
something, to keep themselves free from aimless engagements, and bring
this paste-board war to a close.  If a woman is attractive, she will be
asked out all the same, never fear!  If she is not popular, the few dozen
of "egg-shell extra" that she can manage to slip in at the front doors of
her acquaintances will not help her much.

If this matter is, however, so vastly important in women's eyes, why not
adopt the continental and diplomatic custom and send cards by post or
otherwise?  There, if a new-comer dines out and meets twenty-five people
for the first time, cards must be left the next day at their twenty-five
respective residences.  How the cards get there is of no importance.  It
is a diplomatic fiction that the new acquaintance has called in person,
and the call will be returned within twenty-four hours.  Think of the
saving of time and strength!  In Paris, on New Year's Day, people send
cards by post to everybody they wish to keep up.  That does for a year,
and no more is thought about it.  All the time thus gained can be given
to culture or recreation.

I have often wondered why one sees so few women one knows at our picture
exhibitions or flower shows.  It is no longer a mystery to me.  They are
all busy trotting up and down our long side streets leaving cards.
Hideous vision!  Should Dante by any chance reincarnate, he would find
here the material ready made to his hand for an eighth circle in his
_Inferno_.




No. 21--"Like Master Like Man."


A frequent and naive complaint one hears, is of the unsatisfactoriness of
servants generally, and their ingratitude and astonishing lack of
affection for their masters, in particular.  "After all I have done for
them," is pretty sure to sum up the long tale of a housewife's griefs.  Of
all the delightful inconsistencies that grace the female mind, this
latter point of view always strikes me as being the most complete.  I
artfully lead my fair friend on to tell me all about her woes, and she is
sure to be exquisitely one-sided and quite unconscious of her position.
"They are so extravagant, take so little interest in my things, and leave
me at a moment's notice, if they get an idea I am going to break up.
Horrid things!  I wish I could do without them!  They cause me endless
worry and annoyance."  My friend is very nearly right,--but with whom
lies the fault?

The conditions were bad enough years ago, when servants were kept for
decades in the same family, descending like heirlooms from father to son,
often (abroad) being the foster sisters or brothers of their masters, and
bound to the household by an hundred ties of sympathy and tradition.  But
in our day, and in America, where there is rarely even a common language
or nationality to form a bond, and where households are broken up with
such facility, the relation between master and servant is often so
strained and so unpleasant that we risk becoming (what foreigners
reproach us with being), a nation of hotel-dwellers.  Nor is this class-
feeling greatly to be wondered at.  The contrary would be astonishing.
From the primitive household, where a poor neighbor comes in as "help,"
to the "great" establishment where the butler and housekeeper eat apart,
and a group of plush-clad flunkies imported from England adorn the
entrance-hall, nothing could be better contrived to set one class against
another than domestic service.

Proverbs have grown out of it in every language.  "No man is a hero to
his valet," and "familiarity breeds contempt," are clear enough.  Our
comic papers are full of the misunderstandings and absurdities of the
situation, while one rarely sees a joke made about the other ways that
the poor earn their living.  Think of it for a moment!  To be obliged to
attend people at the times of day when they are least attractive, when
from fatigue or temper they drop the mask that society glues to their
faces so many hours in the twenty-four; to see always the seamy side of
life, the small expedients, the aids to nature; to stand behind a chair
and hear an acquaintance of your master's ridiculed, who has just been
warmly praised to his face; to see a hostess who has been graciously
urging her guests "not to go so soon," blurt out all her boredom and
thankfulness "that those tiresome So-and-So's" are "paid off at last," as
soon as the door is closed behind them, must needs give a curious bent to
a servant's mind.  They see their employers insincere, and copy them.
Many a mistress who has been smilingly assured by her maid how much her
dress becomes her, and how young she is looking, would be thunderstruck
to hear herself laughed at and criticised (none too delicately) five
minutes later in that servant's talk.

Servants are trained from their youth up to conceal their true feelings.
A domestic who said what she thought would quickly lose her place.
Frankly, is it not asking a good deal to expect a maid to be very fond of
a lady who makes her sit up night after night until the small hours to
unlace her bodice or take down her hair; or imagine a valet can be
devoted to a master he has to get into bed as best he can because he is
too tipsy to get there unaided?  Immortal "Figaro" is the type!  Supple,
liar, corrupt, intelligent,--he aids his master and laughs at him,
feathering his own nest the while.  There is a saying that "horses
corrupt whoever lives with them."  It would be more correct to say that
domestic service demoralizes alike both master and man.

Already we are obliged to depend on immigration for our servants because
an American revolts from the false position, though he willingly accepts
longer hours or harder work where he has no one around him but his
equals.  It is the old story of the free, hungry wolf, and the well-fed,
but chained, house-dog.  The foreigners that immigration now brings us,
from countries where great class distinctions exist, find it natural to
"serve."  With the increase in education and consequent self-respect, the
difficulty of getting efficient and contented servants will increase with
us.  It has already become a great social problem in England.  The
trouble lies beneath the surface.  If a superior class accept service at
all, it is with the intention of quickly getting money enough to do
something better.  With them service is merely the means to an end.  A
first step on the ladder!

Bad masters are the cause of so much suffering, that to protect
themselves, the great brother-hood of servants have imagined a system of
keeping run of "places," and giving them a "character" which an aspirant
can find out with little trouble.  This organization is so complete, and
so well carried out, that a household where the lady has a "temper,"
where the food is poor, or which breaks up often, can rarely get a first-
class domestic.  The "place" has been boycotted, a good servant will
sooner remain idle than enter it.  If circumstances are too much for him
and he accepts the situation, it is with his eyes open, knowing
infinitely more about his new employers and their failings than they
dream of, or than they could possibly find out about him.

One thing never can be sufficiently impressed on people, viz.: that we
are forced to live with detectives, always behind us in caps or dress-
suits, ready to note every careless word, every incautious criticism of
friend or acquaintance--their money matters or their love affairs--and
who have nothing more interesting to do than to repeat what they have
heard, with embroideries and additions of their own.  Considering this,
and that nine people out of ten talk quite oblivious of their servants'
presence, it is to be wondered at that so little (and not that so much)
trouble is made.

It always amuses me when I ask a friend if she is going abroad in the
spring, to have her say "Hush!" with a frightened glance towards the
door.

"I am; but I do not want the servants to know, or the horrid things would
leave me!"

Poor, simple lady!  They knew it before you did, and had discussed the
whole matter over their "tea" while it was an almost unuttered thought in
your mind.  If they have not already given you notice, it is because, on
the whole your house suits them well enough for the present, while they
look about.  Do not worry your simple soul, trying to keep anything from
them.  They know the amount of your last dressmaker's bill, and the row
your husband made over it.  They know how much you would have liked young
"Croesus" for your daughter, and the little tricks you played to bring
that marriage about.  They know why you are no longer asked to dine at
Mrs. Swell's, which is more than you know yourself.  Mrs. Swell explained
the matter to a few friends over her lunch-table recently, and the butler
told your maid that same evening, who was laughing at the story as she
put on your slippers!

Before we blame them too much, however, let us remember that they have it
in their power to make great trouble if they choose.  And considering the
little that is made in this way, we must conclude that, on the whole,
they are better than we give them credit for being, and fill a trying
situation with much good humor and kindliness.  The lady who is
astonished that they take so little interest in her, will perhaps feel
differently if she reflects how little trouble she has given herself to
find out their anxieties and griefs, their temptations and
heart-burnings; their material situation; whom they support with their
slowly earned wages, what claims they have on them from outside.  If she
will also reflect on the number of days in a year when she is "not
herself," when headaches or disappointments ruffle her charming temper,
she may come to the conclusion that it is too much to expect all the
virtues for twenty dollars a month.

A little more human interest, my good friends, a little more indulgence,
and you will not risk finding yourself in the position of the lady who
wrote me that last summer she had been obliged to keep open house for
"'Cook' tourists!"




No. 22--An English Invasion of the Riviera


When sixty years ago Lord Brougham, _en route_ for Italy, was thrown from
his travelling berline and his leg was broken, near the Italian hamlet of
Cannes, the Riviera was as unknown to the polite world as the centre of
China.  The _grand tour_ which every young aristocrat made with his
tutor, on coming of age, only included crossing from France into Italy by
the Alps.  It was the occurrence of an unusually severe winter in
Switzerland that turned Brougham aside into the longer and less travelled
route _via_ the Corniche, the marvellous Roman road at that time fallen
into oblivion, and little used even by the local peasantry.

During the tedious weeks while his leg was mending, Lord Brougham amused
himself by exploring the surrounding country in his carriage, and was
quick to realize the advantages of the climate, and appreciate the
marvellous beauty of that coast.  Before the broken member was whole
again, he had bought a tract of land and begun a villa.  Small seed, to
furnish such a harvest!  To the traveller of to-day the Riviera offers an
almost unbroken chain of beautiful residences from Marseilles to Genoa.

A Briton willingly follows where a lord leads, and Cannes became the
centre of English fashion, a position it holds to-day in spite of many
attractive rivals, and the defection of Victoria who comes now to Cimiez,
back of Nice, being unwilling to visit Cannes since the sudden death
there of the Duke of Albany.  A statue of Lord Brougham, the "discoverer"
of the littoral, has been erected in the sunny little square at Cannes,
and the English have in many other ways, stamped the city for their own.

No other race carry their individuality with them as they do.  They can
live years in a country and assimilate none of its customs; on the
contrary, imposing habits of their own.  It is just this that makes them
such wonderful colonizers, and explains why you will find little groups
of English people drinking ale and playing golf in the shade of the
Pyramids or near the frozen slopes of Foosiyama.  The real inwardness of
it is that they are a dull race, and, like dull people despise all that
they do not understand.  To differ from them is to be in the wrong.  They
cannot argue with you; they simply know, and that ends the matter.

I had a discussion recently with a Briton on the pronunciation of a word.
As there is no "Institute," as in France, to settle matters of this kind,
I maintained that we Americans had as much authority for our
pronunciation of this particular word as the English.  The answer was
characteristic.

"I know I am right," said my Island friend, "because that is the way I
pronounce it!"

Walking along the principal streets of Cannes to-day, you might imagine
yourself (except for the climate) at Cowes or Brighton, so British are
the shops and the crowd that passes them.  Every restaurant advertises
"afternoon tea" and Bass's ale, and every other sign bears a London name.
This little matter of tea is particularly characteristic of the way the
English have imposed a taste of their own on a rebellious nation.  Nothing
is further from the French taste than tea-drinking, and yet a Parisian
lady will now invite you gravely to "five o'clocker" with her, although I
can remember when that beverage was abhorred by the French as a medicine;
if you had asked a Frenchman to take a cup of tea, he would have
answered:

"Why?  I am not ill!"

Even Paris (that supreme and undisputed arbiter of taste) has submitted
to English influence; tailor-made dresses and low-heeled shoes have
become as "good form" in France as in London.  The last two Presidents of
the French Republic have taken the oath of office dressed in frock-coats
instead of the dress clothes to which French officials formerly clung as
to the sacraments.

The municipalities of the little Southern cities were quick to seize
their golden opportunity, and everything was done to detain the rich
English wandering down towards Italy.  Millions were spent in
transforming their cramped, dirty, little towns.  Wide boulevards
bordered with palm and eucalyptus spread their sunny lines in all
directions, being baptized _Promenade des Anglais_ or _Boulevard
Victoria_, in artful flattery.  The narrow mountain roads were widened,
casinos and theatres built and carnival _fetes_ organized, the cities
offering "cups" for yacht- or horse-races, and giving grounds for tennis
and golf clubs.  Clever Southern people!  The money returned to them a
hundredfold, and they lived to see their wild coast become the chosen
residence of the wealthiest aristocracy in Europe, and the rocky
hillsides blossom into terrace above terrace of villa gardens, where palm
and rose and geranium vie with the olive and the mimosa to shade the
white villas from th

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