Part 12
Simple, humorous, average American man! You have left your suburban couch in time to walk half a mile to the station and catch the 7.59 for the city. You have read your morning paper; discussed the weather, the tariff, and the prospects for lettuce with your neighbor; and made the office only a minute late. You have been fastened to your desk from nine o'clock to five, with half an hour for lunch, which you have eaten in a clamorous, overheated restaurant while you watched your hat and coat. At odd moments during the day the thought of doctor's bills, rent bills, school bills, has insisted on receiving attention. At the end of the day, laden with parcels from the market, from the hardware store, from the seedman, you are bound for the ferry to catch the 5.43, when you meet Smith, who, having passed the good word, sends you on your way with the injunction to be good--not to play roulette, not to open wine, not to turkey-trot, not to joy-ride, not to haunt the stage door. Be good, O simple, humorous, average suburban American!
I take back that word suburban. The Sunday Supplement has given it a meaning which is not mine. I am speaking only of the suburban in spirit, of a simplicity, a meekness which is of the soul only. Outwardly there is nothing suburban about the crowd on lower Broadway. The man in the street is not at all the diminutive, apologetic creature with side whiskers whom Mr. F. B. Opper brought forth and named Common People, who begat the Strap-Hanger, who begat the Rent-Payer and the Ultimate Consumer. The crowd on lower Broadway is alert and well set up. Yes, though one hates to do it, I must say 'clean-cut.' The men on the sidewalk are young, limber, sharp-faced, almost insolent young men. There are not very many old men in the crowd, though I see any number of gray-haired young men. Seldom do you detect the traditional signs of age, the sagging lines of the face, the relaxed abdominal contour, the tamed spirit. The young, the young-old, the old-young, but rarely quite the old.
I am speaking only of externals. Clean-cut, eager faces are very frequently disappointing. A very ordinary mind may be working behind that clear sweep of brow and nose and chin. I have known the shock of young men who look like kings of Wall Street and speak like shoe clerks. They are shoe clerks. But the appearance is there, that athletic carriage which is helped out by our triumphant, ready-made clothing. I suppose I ought to detest the tailor's tricks which iron out all ages and all stations into a uniformity of padded shoulders and trim waist-lines and hips. I imagine I ought to despise our habit of wearing elegant shoddy where the European chooses honest, clumsy woolens. But I am concerned only with externals, and in outward appearances a Broadway crowd beats the world. Æsthetically we simply are in a class by ourselves when compared with the Englishman and the Teuton in their skimpy, ill-cut garments. Let the British and German ambassadors at Washington do their worst. This is my firm belief and I will maintain it against the world. The truth must out. _Ruat coelum. Ich kann nicht anders. J'y suis, j'y reste._
Williams laughs at my lyrical outbursts. But I am not yet through. I still have to speak of the women in the crowd. What an infinitely finer thing is a woman than a man of her class! To see this for yourself you have only to walk up Broadway until the southward-bearing stream breaks off and the tide begins to run from west to east. You have passed out of the commercial district into the region of factories. It is well on toward dark, and the barracks that go by the unlovely name of loft buildings, are pouring out their battalions of needle-workers. The crowd has become a mass. The nervous pace of lower Broadway slackens to the steady, patient tramp of a host. It is an army of women, with here and there a flying detachment of the male.
On the faces of the men the day's toil has written its record even as on the women, but in a much coarser hand. Fatigue has beaten down the soul of these men into brutish indifference, but in the women it has drawn fine the flesh only to make it more eloquent of the soul. Instead of listlessness, there is wistfulness. Instead of vacuity you read mystery. Innate grace rises above the vulgarity of the dress. Cheap, tawdry blouse and imitation willow-plume walk shoulder to shoulder with the shoddy coat of the male, copying Fifth Avenue as fifty cents may attain to five dollars. But the men's shoddy is merely a horror, whereas woman transfigures and subtilizes the cheap material. The spirit of grace which is the birthright of her sex cannot be killed--not even by the presence of her best young man in Sunday clothes. She is finer by the heritage of her sex, and America has accentuated her title. This America which drains her youthful vigor with overwork, which takes from her cheeks the color she has brought from her Slavic or Italian peasant home, makes restitution by remoulding her in more delicate, more alluring lines, gives her the high privilege of charm--and neurosis.
Williams and I pause at the Subway entrances and watch the earth suck in the crowd. It lets itself be swallowed up with meek good-nature. Our amazing good-nature! Political philosophers have deplored the fact. They have urged us to be quicker-tempered, more resentful of being stepped upon, more inclined to write letters to the editor. I agree that only in that way can we be rid of political bosses, of brutal policemen, of ticket-speculators, of taxi-cab extortioners, of insolent waiters, of janitors, of indecent congestion in travel, of unheated cars in the winter and barred-up windows in summer. I am at heart with the social philosophers. But then I am not typical of the crowd. When my neighbor's elbow injects itself into the small of my back, I twist around and glower at him. I forget that his elbow is the innocent mechanical result of a whole series of elbows and backs extending the length of the car, to where the first cause operates in the form of a station-guard's shoulder ramming the human cattle into their stalls. In the faces about me there is no resentment. Instead of smashing windows, instead of raising barricades in the Subway and hanging the train-guards with their own lanterns about their necks, the crowd sways and bends to the lurching of the train, and young voices call out cheerfully, 'Plenty of room ahead.'
Horribly good-natured! We have taken a phrase which is the badge of our shame and turned it into a jest. Plenty of room ahead! If this were a squat, ill-formed proletarian race obviously predestined to subjection, one might understand. But that a crowd of trim, well-cut, self-reliant Americans, sharp-featured, alert, insolent as I have called them, that they should submit is a puzzle. Perhaps it is because of the fierce democracy of it all. The crush, the enforced intimacies of physical contact, the feeling that a man's natural condition is to push and be pushed, to shove ahead when the opportunity offers and to take it like a man when no chance presents itself--that is equality. A seat in the Subway is like the prizes of life for which men have fought in these United States. You struggle, you win or lose. If the other man wins there is no envy; admiration rather, provided he has not shouldered and elbowed out of reason. That god-like freedom from envy is passing to-day, and perhaps the good-nature of the crowd in the Subway will pass. I see signs of the approaching change. People do not call out, 'Plenty of room ahead,' so frequently as they used to.
Good-natured when dangling from the strap in the Subway, good-natured in front of baseball bulletins on Park Row, good-natured in the face of so much oppression and injustice, where is the supposed cruelty of the 'mob'? I am ready to affirm on oath that the mob is not vindictive, that it is not cruel. It may be a bit sharp-tongued, fickle, a bit mischievous, but in the heart of the crowd there is no evil passion. The evil comes from the leaders, the demagogues, the professional distorters of right thinking and right feeling. The crowd in the bleachers is not the clamorous, brute mob of tradition. I have watched faces in the bleachers and in the grand-stand and seen little of that fury which is supposed to animate the fan. For the most part he sits there with folded arms, thin-lipped, eager, but after all conscious that there are other things in life besides baseball. No, it is the leaders, the baseball editors, the cartoonists, the humorists, the professional stimulators of 'local pride,' with their exaggerated gloatings over a game won, their poisonous attacks upon a losing team, who are responsible. It is these demagogues who drill the crowd in the gospel of loving only a winner--but if I keep on I shall be in politics before I know it.
If you see in the homeward crowd in the Subway a face over which the pall of depression has settled, that face very likely is bent over the comic pictures in the evening paper. I cannot recall seeing any one smile over these long serials of humorous adventure which run from day to day and from year to year. I have seen readers turn mechanically to these lurid comics and pore over them, foreheads puckered into a frown, lips unconsciously spelling out the long legends which issue in the form of little balloons and lozenges from that amazing portrait gallery of dwarfs, giants, shrilling viragos and their diminutive husbands, devil-children, quadrupeds, insects,--an entire zoölogy. If any stimulus rises from these pages to the puzzled brain, the effect is not visible. I imagine that by dint of repetition through the years these grotesque creations have become a reality to millions of readers. It is no longer a question of humor, it is a vice. The Desperate Desmonds, the Newly-weds, and the Dingbats, have acquired a horrible fascination. Otherwise I cannot see why readers of the funny page should appear to be memorizing pages from Euclid.
This by way of anticipation. What the doctor has said of exercise being a habit which grows easy with time is true. It is the first five minutes of walking that are wearisome. I find myself strolling past Fourteenth Street, where I was to take my train for Belshazzar Court. Never mind, Forty-Second Street will do as well. I am now on a different Broadway. The crowd is no longer north and south, but flows in every direction. It is churned up at every corner and spreads itself across the squares and open places. Its appearance has changed. It is no longer a factory population. Women still predominate, but they are the women of the professions and trades which centre about Madison Square--business women of independent standing, women from the magazine offices, the publishing houses, the insurance offices. You detect the bachelor girl in the current which sets in toward the home quarters of the undomesticated, the little Bohemias, the foreign eating-places whose fixed _table d'hôte_ prices flash out in illumined signs from the side streets. Still farther north and the crowd becomes tinged with the current of that Broadway which the outside world knows best. The idlers begin to mingle with the workers, men in English clothes with canes, women with plumes and jeweled reticules. You catch the first heart-beat of Little Old New York.
The first stirrings of this gayer Broadway die down as quickly almost as they manifested themselves. The idlers and those who minister to them have heard the call of the dinner hour and have vanished, into hotel doors, into shabbier quarters by no means in keeping with the cut of their garments and their apparent indifference to useful employment. Soon the street is almost empty. It is not a beautiful Broadway in this garish interval between the last of the matinée and shopping crowd and the vanguard of the night crowd. The monster electric sign-boards have not begun to gleam and flash and revolve and confound the eye and the senses. At night the electric Niagara hides the squalid fronts of ugly brick, the dark doorways, the clutter of fire-escapes, the rickety wooden hoardings. Not an imperial street this Broadway at 6.30 of a summer's afternoon. Cheap jewelry shops, cheap tobacconist's shops, cheap haberdasheries, cheap restaurants, grimy little newspaper agencies and ticket-offices, and 'demonstration' stores for patent foods, patent waters, patent razors.
O Gay White Way, you are far from gay in the fast-fading light, before the magic hand of Edison wipes the wrinkles from your face and galvanizes you into hectic vitality; far from alluring with your tinsel shop windows, with your puffy-faced, unshaven men leaning against door-posts and chewing pessimistic toothpicks, your sharp-eyed newsboys wise with the wisdom of the Tenderloin, and your itinerant women whose eyes wander from side to side. It is not in this guise that you draw the hearts of millions to yourself, O dingy, Gay White Way, O Via Lobsteria Dolorosa!
Well, when a man begins to moralize it is time to go home. I have walked farther than I intended, and I am soft from lack of exercise, and tired. The romance of the crowd has disappeared. Romance cannot survive that short passage of Longacre Square, where the art of the theatre and of the picture-postcard flourish in an atmosphere impregnated with gasolene. As I glance into the windows of the automobile salesrooms and catch my own reflection in the enamel of Babylonian limousines I find myself thinking all at once of the children at home. They expand and fill up the horizon. Broadway disappears. I smile into the face of a painted promenader, but how is she to know that it is not at her I smile but at the sudden recollection of what the baby said at the breakfast-table that morning? Like all good New Yorkers when they enter the Subway, I proceed to choke up all my senses against contact with the external world, and thus resolving myself into a state of coma, I dip down into the bowels of the earth, whence in due time I am spewed out two short blocks from Belshazzar Court.
Fashions in Men
By Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Never, I fancy, has it been more true than it is to-day, that fiction reflects life. The best fiction has always given us a kind of precipitate of human nature--_Don Quixote_ and _Tom Jones_ are equally 'true' and true, in a sense, for all time; but our modern books give us every quirk and turn of the popular ideal, and fifty years hence, if read at all, may be too 'quaint' for words. And to any one who has been reading fiction for the last twenty years, it is cryingly obvious that fashions in human nature have changed.
My first novel was _Jane Eyre_; and at the age of eight, I fell desperately in love with Fairfax Rochester. No instance could serve better to point the distance we have come. I was not an extraordinary little girl (except that, perhaps, I was extraordinarily fortunate in being permitted to encounter the classics in infancy), and I dare say that if I had not met Mr. Rochester, I should have succumbed to some imaginary gentleman of a quite different stamp. It may be that I should have fallen in love--had time and chance permitted--with 'V. V.' or The Beloved Vagabond. But I doubt it. In the first place, novels no longer assume that it is the prime business of the female heart (at whatever age) to surrender itself completely to some man. Consequently, the men in the novels of to-day are not calculated, as they once were, to hit the fluttering mark. The emotions are the last redoubt to be taken, as modern tactics direct the assault.
People are always telling us that fashions in women have changed: what seems to me almost more interesting is that fashions in men (the stable sex) have changed to match. The new woman (by which I mean the very newest) would not fall in love with Mr. Rochester. It is therefore 'up to' the novelists to create heroes whom the modern heroine will fall in love with. This, to the popular satisfaction, they have done. And not only in fiction have the men changed; in life, too, the men of to-day are quite different. I know, because my friends marry them.
It is immensely interesting, this difference. One by one, the man has sloughed off his most masculine (as we knew them) characteristics. Gone are Mr. Rochester, who fought the duel with the vicomte at dawn, and Burgo Fitzgerald (the only love of that incomparable woman, Lady Glencora Palliser), who breakfasted on curaçao and pâté de foie gras. No longer does Blanche Ingram declare, 'An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit, and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.' Blanche Ingram wants--and gets--the Humanitarian Hero; some one who has particular respect for convicts and fallen women, and whose favorite author is Tolstoï. He must qualify for the possession of her hand by long, voluntary residence in the slums; he may inherit ancestral acres only if he has, concerning them, socialistic intentions. He must be too altruistic to kill grouse, and if he is to be wholly up-to-date, he must refuse to eat them. He must never order 'pistols and coffee': his only permitted weapon is benevolent legislation.
I do not mean that he is to be a milk-sop--'muscular Christianity' has at least taught us that it is well for the hero to be in the pink of condition, as he may any day have a street fight on his hands. And he should have the tongue of men and of angels. Gone is the inarticulate Guardsman--gone forever. The modern hero has read books that Burgo Fitzgerald and Guy Livingstone and Mr. Rochester never heard of. He is ready to address any gathering, and to argue with any antagonist, until dawn. He is, preferably, personally unconscious of sex until the heroine arrives; but he is by no means effeminate. He is a very complicated and interesting creature. Some mediæval traits are discernible in him; but the eighteenth century would not have known him for human.
What has he lost, this hero, and what has he gained? How did it all begin? In life, doubtless, it began with a feminine change of taste. Brilliant plumage has ceased to allure; and, I suspect, the peacock's tail, as much as the anthropoid ape's, is destined to elimination. We women of to-day are distrustful of the peacock's tail. We are mortally afraid of being misled by it, and of discovering, too late, that the peacock's soul is not quite the thing. Never has there been among the feminine young more scientific talk about sex, and never among the feminine young such a scientific distrust of it. Before a young woman suspects that she wants to marry a young man, she has probably discussed with him, exhaustively, the penal code, white slavery, eugenics, and race-suicide. The miracle--the everlasting miracle of Nature--is that she should want, in these circumstances, to marry him at all. She probably does not, unless his views have been wholly to her satisfaction. And with those views, what has the perpetual glory of the peacock's tail to do?
So much for life. In our English fiction, I am inclined to believe that George Eliot began it with Daniel Deronda. But, in our own day, Meredith did more. Up to the time of Meredith, the dominant male was the fashionable hero. Tom Jones, and Sir Charles Grandison, and Fairfax Rochester, and 'Stunning' Warrington are as different as possible; but all of them, in their several ways, keep up one male tradition in fiction. It is within our own day that that tradition has entirely changed. Have you ever noticed how inveterately, in Meredith's novels, the schoolmaster or his spiritual kinsman comes out on top? Lord Ormont cannot stand against Matey Weyburn, Lord Fleetwood against Owain Wythan, Sir Willoughby Patterne against Vernon Whitford. The little girl who fell in love with Mr. Rochester would have preferred any one of these gentlemen (yes, even Sir Willoughby!) to his rival; but I dare say the event would have proved her wrong. Certainly the wisdom of the ladies' choice was never doubtful to Meredith himself. The soldier and the aristocrat cannot endure the test they are put to by the sympathetic male with a penchant for the enfranchised woman. Vain for Lord Ormont to accede to Aminta's taste for publicity; vain for Lord Fleetwood to become the humble wooer of Carinthia Jane: each has previously been convicted of pride.
Now, in an earlier day, no woman would have looked at a man who was not proud--who was not, even, a little too proud. Pride, by which Lucifer fell, was the chief hall-mark of the gentleman. Moreover, in that earlier day, women did not expect their heroes to explain everything to them: a certain amount of reticence, a measure of silence, was also one of the hallmarks of the gentleman. If a bit of mystery could be thrown in, so much the better. It gave her something to exercise her imagination on. Think of the Byronic males--Conrad, Lara, and the rest! If they had told all, where would they have been? Think of Lovelace and Heathcote and Darcy and Brian de Bois Guilbert!
Heroes, once, were always disdaining to speak, and spurning their foes. Nowadays, no hero disdains to speak, and no hero ventures to spurn anyone--least of all, his foes. He is humble of heart and very loquacious. Mrs. Humphry Ward has inherited from George Eliot; and the latest heroes of Mr. Galsworthy and Mr. Hewlett, for example, are the children of Vernon Whitford, Matey Weyburn, and Owain Wythan (of whom it is not explicitly written that they had any others). They are humanitarian and democratic; they are ignorant of hatred; they are inclined to think the ill-born necessarily better than the well-born; and they are quite sure that women are superior to men. True, Mr. Galsworthy always seems to be looking backward; he never forgets the ancient tradition that he is combating. His young aristocrats who eschew the ways of aristocracy are unhappy, and virtue in their case is 'its only reward.' Perhaps that is why his novels always leave us with the medicinal taste of inconclusion in our mouths. But take a handful of heroes elsewhere: the Reverend John Hodder, the ex-convict,'Daniel Smith,' 'V. V.', or even Coryston, the Socialist peer. Where, in the lot of them do you find either pride or reticence in the old sense? Where, in any one of them, do you find the Satanic charm? Which one would Harriet Byron, or Jane Eyre, or Catherine Earnshaw, or Elizabeth Bennett, have looked at with eyes of love?
The 'Satanic charm.' The phrase is out. Milton, I suspect, is responsible for the tradition that has lasted so long, and is now being broken utterly to pieces. Milton made Satan delightful, and our good Protestant novelists for a long time followed his lead, in that they gave their delightful men some of the Satanic traits. Proud they were and scornfully silent, as we have recalled; and conventional to the last degree. 'Conventional,' that is, in the stricter sense; by which it is not meant that as portraits they were unconvincing, or that, as men, they never offended Mrs. Grundy. They were conventional in that they followed a convention; in that they were, to a large extent, predicable. They were jealous of their honor, and believed it vindicable by the duel; they had no doubt that good women were better than bad, and that pedigree in human beings was as important as pedigree in animals; and though they might be quixotic on occasion, they were not democratic _pour deux sous_. The barmaid was not their sister, nor the stevedore their brother. (The Satan of _Paradise Lost_, as we all remember, was a splendid snob.)