Part 4

I am told that precisely the same standards prevail in the newer urban civilizations of England: it would seem to be an inevitable immediate result of the supremacy of riches. There is perhaps no limit to the sophistication that vast wealth can eventually give to its own possessors; but this law of fashion is what, consciously or unconsciously, they impose on the seething estates beneath them. I have known tragedies in smallish American cities that began and ended in dress: women deprived of their all too infrequent intellectual and social delights, simply because they could not bring themselves to face an assembly in which other women whose authority their own taste could not acknowledge, knew their “best” dresses by heart.

I have said that the economic considerations are no concern of mine; nor are they, Yet it may not be amiss to suggest in this context that the women who are responsible for the almost unpaid toil of the slum-children over “willow” plumes are not the rich women who will give for their willow plumes any price that is asked of them. It is the harpy of the suburbs, the frequenter of bargain-counters and Monday morning “sales,” the woman whose most instructive reading is done among the designs and patterns of the “women’s” magazines, who is responsible. From what one reads, one is certainly compelled to infer that if these little children are to be saved, willow plumes should be put at prohibitive prices. “But since our women _must_ walk gay,” the aristocracy that is rooted in democracy can hardly do without its willow plumes. Fashion has got itself into a position of such importance as that. It is so terrible a thing to be unfashionable that the vast majority of women--and the vast majority of women are not rich or anything like it--stretch every nerve to be in fashion. They miss, if they are not, too much that is legitimately theirs. The requirement is irrelevant, is absurd; but it is made. They will, therefore, pay what they can; but they cannot pay much. The logic is clear. They go to the great shops to demand their willow plumes, and their Irish-lace collars, in the very spirit which took the Dames de la Halle to Versailles. Hence many of the conditions of labor about which we read so many lurid articles. For demand creates supply.

The American woman of moderate income is alternately congratulated on her “smartness” and scolded for her extravagance. She cannot very well, as things stand, be smart without being extravagant. But the fact that chiefly gives one pause is this: that a woman cannot mingle comfortably with her equals unless she can clothe herself each season in a way that both to her and to them would have looked preposterous a twelvemonth before. It has luckily become, in the strictest sense, vulgar, to be _endimanchée_; but most people are--by definition--vulgar; and I have known women, again, who stayed at home from church because they could not so clothe themselves. Not unadvisedly, I am tempted to say; for in one of the most famous churches of America, I have seen the shabbily dressed woman seated, by the usher, with reference solely to her costume; and I have heard, too, the testimony of other women of her kind, turned into “stay-at-homes” because precisely that thing they could not endure. An odd battle of pride with pride; and there are better uses to put pride to than that. More blatant and less grim is the authentic anecdote recently told me concerning a Newport “colonist.” She and her daughter entered the church one Sunday morning, marvellously dressed in contrasting shades of red. “There will be no one else in our pew this morning,” she murmured graciously to the usher; “put some one in with us, if you like--any one in white or black.” What could not Dean Swift have done with that! One does not wish to make tragedy out of what is essentially comic. Yet it may fairly be said that comedy has its rough side, and that a comedy retold from the point of view of the comic character himself, would often make melancholy stuff. It would be possible, over this matter of fashion, to shed the bitter tears of the satirist.

It is odd that “dress reform” should always have meant something ugly. There would be so tremendous a chance for any one who wished to reform dress in the interest of beauty! But the most amused and disgusted of us will, very likely, forever shrink from the task. “The pilgrims were clothed with such kind of raiment as was diverse from the raiment of any that traded in that fair. The people, therefore, of the fair made a great gazing upon them: some said they were fools, some they were bedlams, and some they were outlandish men.” There are two reasons why we shall shrink from it: we should have to begin with ourselves; and we should certainly be called bedlams. But oh, the pity of it!

CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE

One can usually either begin or end with Mr. Chesterton, though one can seldom do both. “It is simpler to eat caviare on impulse than to eat grape-nuts on principle,” he says, in one of his intervals of pure lucidity. I should like to make a Chestertonian transposition, and pronounce that it is better (I do not say simpler) to eat caviare on principle than to eat grape-nuts on impulse. The fact is that the modern fad of simplicity for its own sake has ceased to be merely ridiculous; it has become dangerous. May not some of us lift our voices against it?

I have no right, I suppose, to ally, in my own mind, socialists and vegetarians. But I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative. I am sure that they, on their side, confuse snobs with meat-eaters. One could forgive them, were they more bitterly logical. For my own part, I should be quite willing to go the length of all Hinduism and say that rice itself has a soul. I can even see myself joining a “movement” for giving the vote to violets and disfranchising orchids. This, however, is not their desire. They do not wish to make even the ox a citizen--only a brother; and I have never discovered that vegetarians--even when they were “hygienic,” not “sentimental,” ones--were anxious to reproduce the history of the rice-fed peoples. But let their logic take care of itself. My point is really that socialists and vegetarians are banded together to fight for the simplifying of life. Socialism, of course, organizes as furiously as Capital itself; and I leave it to any one if a nut-cutlet is not complicated to the point of mendacity. But ostensibly both sects are on the side of Procrustes against human vagaries. Both would surely consider caviare immoral; either because no one ought to eat it, or because every one cannot. It does not much matter, I fancy, which point you make against the dried roe of the sturgeon. My own plea for caviare rests precisely on the fact that it is not, and cannot be, thrust into every one’s mouth. It is not simple, no. The only really “simple” food-stuff is manna. Imagine, for example, calling anything simple that has to be shot out of a cannon by way of preparation. In point of fact, very few people eat caviare save on impulse,--otherwise, they find it too nasty. But it is an impulse worthy of being dogmatized; of becoming a principle.

Simplicity is an acquired taste. Mankind, left free, instinctively complicates life. The hardest command to follow has always been that which bids us take no thought for the morrow. Perhaps that is what Mr. Chesterton means when he talks of the difficulty of eating grape-nuts on principle. The real drawback to “the simple life” is that it is not simple. If you are living it, you positively can do nothing else. There is not time. For the simple life demands virtually that there shall be no specialization. The _Hausfrau_ who is living the simple life must, after all, sweep, scour, wash, and mend. She must also cook; from that, even Battle Creek cannot save her. She may dream sternly of Margaret Fuller, who read Plato while she pared apples; but in her secret heart she knows that either Plato or the apples suffered. And from what point of view is it simpler to have a maid-of-all-work than to indulge one’s self in liveried lackeys? Not, obviously, for the mistress; and it is surely simpler to be an adequate second footman than to be an adequate _bonne-à-tout-faire_. We should really simplify life by having more servants rather than fewer; more luxury instead of less. The smoothest machinery is the most complicated; and which of us wants to sink the Mauretania and go back to Robert Fulton’s steamboat? One would think that the decision would be made naturally for one by one’s income. But it is the triumph of the new paradox that this is not so. Thousands of people seem to be infected with the idea that by doing more themselves they bestow leisure on others; that by wearing shabby clothes they somehow make it possible for others to dress better--though they thus admit tacitly that leisure and elegance are not evil things. Or perhaps--though Heaven forbid they should be right!--they merely think that by refusing nightingales’ tongues, they make every one more content with porridge. Let us be gallant about the porridge that we must eat, but let us never forget that there are better things to eat than porridge.

And all time past, was it all for this? Times unforgotten, and treasures of things?

What is the use of throwing great museums open to the people, if you tell them at the same time that to possess the contents of the museums would not make a private person happier? Why should there be _cordons bleus_ in the world, if we ought to live on bread and milk? Above all, why have we praised, through the centuries, all the slow processes, the tardy consummations, of perfection, if raw material, either in art or life, is really best? I recall at this instant a friend of mine who expresses her democracy in her footwear. Her frocks are as charming as money can induce Paquin to make them; but if her frocks are an insult to the poor, her boots are an insult to the rich. I have seen her walk to a garden-party, in real lace, and out at heel. She fancied, I think, that her inadequate boots obliterated the deplorable social distinction between herself and her cook. In point of fact, her cook would not have condescended to them; would not have considered herself a “lady” if she had.

I have other friends who feel strongly the ignominy of personal service: who agree with many ignorant young women that it is more dignified to be a bullied, insulted, underpaid shop-girl with a rhinestone sunburst, than a well-paid, highly-respected parlor-maid in a uniform. Accordingly, they conscientiously deprive themselves of the parlor-maid, and spend her wages in trying to get a vote for the shop-girl. I do not understand their distinctions in liberty, or their definition of degradation. The parlor-maid at least can choose the mistress, but the shop-girl cannot choose the floor-walker.

I am, myself, essentially an undomestic woman, and I dislike the parlor-maid’s tasks to the point of feeling excessive irritation at having, occasionally, in this mad world, to perform them. But, seriously speaking, apart from the temperamental quirk, I would don her clothes and follow officially her career, rather than that parlor-maids in uniforms should pass wholly from the world. It is as if these people said, “Since those who are parlor-maids themselves cannot very well employ parlor-maids, then let no one have a parlor-maid.” Their factitious altruism, with all its peril, might be forgiven them; but the misguided creatures (who are human beings and egotists, after all, and as such must “save their face”) go on to say that it is really much nicer not to have parlor-maids. And that lie is unpardonable, for it strikes at the root of human experience. Parlor-maids would never have become a convention if they had not been found desirable.

Are we really, at this late day, going to be duped by the mid-century fallacy that “plain living and high thinking” are a natural combination? Even if Shakespeare at New Place teaches us nothing, we cannot fail to be impressed by the memory of Thoreau, stealing home from Lake Walden by dark, to provide himself secretly with better fare than the woods afforded. As if, indeed, any one who had tried plain living did not know that high thinking was done, if at all, in spite of it! “The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense,” as Shakespeare long since said. Let us open our own front doors, polish our own shoes, dust our own bibelots, and make messes on a chafing-dish when the cook is out; and let us do it gallantly. But let us not pretend that it is more civilized to do these things ourselves than to have them skilfully done for us. The prince in disguise makes the most charming beggar in the world, no doubt; but that is because--as all fairy-tales from the beginning of time have taught us--the prince wears his rags as if they were purple. And, to do that, he not only must once have worn purple, but must never forget the purple that he has worn. And to the argument that all cannot wear purple, I can, as I say, only reply that that seems to me to be no reason why all should wear rags.

Until every one is too good to be a parlor-maid, let us open our own doors, if we must--provided we do it according to the great tradition of door-opening; but how can we do it according to the great tradition if we abolish parlor-maids and dry up the fount of the great tradition? And, whatever the simplifiers say, there is no doubt that, as yet, there are, to one person who is too good for door-opening, ten persons who are by no means good enough for it. I have never been able to imagine just how the sound of the Last Trump is going to shiver the aristocracy of earth into the democracy of Heaven. To be sure, it is not my affair. But at least one can have, this side the grave, little patience with the altruisms of the Procrusteans. They merely wish to make each of us an incompetent Jack-at-all-trades. And one had thought the German universities, if they had done nothing else, had blown that bubble!

A friend of mine asked me the other day if I did not feel degraded to be at the mercy of servants; humiliated by knowing that they could perform domestic tasks better than I, and could take advantage of that fact. I confess it had never occurred to me. If my cook felt degraded by being unable to talk French, I should think her a silly snob. Are we not all, economically, at one another’s mercy? Of what does enthusiastic living of the “simple” life make us independent, save of a few hard-learned and precious lessons of taste? The successful housewife is the one who has succeeded in imitating perfectly several trained servants. But the criterion is still the trained servant. The distinguished beggar is the one who wears his rags as if they were purple. But, to appreciate him, we must know the look of purple rightly worn. The admirable vegetarian eats his shredded wheat as if it were caviare. But where would be the beauty of his performance were not someone, somewhere, eating caviare as if it were shredded wheat?

THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE

It is odd how words recur. There has been more talk about culture, among educated people in America, during the last months, than there had been for years. To be sure, the culture discussed since August, 1914, has been German Kultur; but that does not matter. We have actually been talking about culture once more; rehabilitating it, if only for the sake of denying that the Germans, by and large, have a monopoly of anything so good. To some of us, this recurrence of a word so long _tabu_ is welcome--and as side-splittingly funny as it is welcome. For the fact is that for twenty years--ever since Matthew Arnold went out of fashion--to speak of culture has meant that one did not have it. The only people who have talked about it have been the people who have thought you could get it at Chautauquas. To use the word damned you in the eyes of the knowing. Now I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are very apt to lose the thing it stands for. Indeed, it has seemed only too clear that we were doing all in our power to lose both the word and the thing. I fancy we ought to be grateful to the Germans for getting “culture” on to all the editorial pages of the country; though I admit it sometimes seems as if the Germans bore out the rule that only those people talk about it who have it not. I should really like to make a plea for the temporary reversal of the rule. Indeed, I think we are getting to a point where we are so little “cultured” that we can really afford to talk about it. When the plutocrat goes bankrupt, he may once more, with decency, mention the prices of things. Culture has ceased to be a passionate American preoccupation. Perhaps we shall not offend modesty if we use the word once more.

Now there are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it than we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking. Having, myself, a congenital case of agoraphobia, I habitually say nothing to the professional optimists in the public square. The wilderness is a good place to cry in; the echoes are magnificent. So I shall not attempt to deprive any one of Candide’s happy conviction. If any person is kind enough to listen, I will simply ask him to contemplate a few facts with me. No one will be too optimistic, I fancy, to grant that there are _proportionally_ fewer Americans who care about culture--and who know the real thing when they see it--than there were one or two generations ago. Contact with “the best that has been thought and said in the world” is not desired by so large a proportion of the community as it was. That there are new and _parvenu_ branches of learning, furiously followed, I, on my part, shall not attempt to deny. But culture is another matter. Perhaps the sociologists can show that this is a good thing. I do not ask any one to deplore anything. I only ask the well-disposed to examine the change that has come over the spirit of our American dream.

If I were asked to give, off hand, the causes of the gradual extirpation of culture among us, I should name the following:

1. The increased hold of the democratic fallacy on the public mind.

2. The influx of a racially and socially inferior population.

3. Materialism in all classes.

4. The idolatry of science.

Only one of these is purely intellectual; two might almost be called political. In point of fact, all four are interwoven.

I should be insultingly trite if I proceeded here to expound the fallacy of the historic statement that all men are born free and equal. We have all known for a long time that individual freedom and individual equality cannot co-exist. I dare say no one since Thomas Jefferson (and may I express my doubts even of that inspired charlatan?) has really believed it. No one could believe it at the present day except the people who are flattered by it; and of people who are flattered by it, it is obviously not true. The democracy of the present day--like the aristocracy of another day--is fostered by the people whom it advantages; and the people whom it advantages are adding themselves, at the rate of a million a year, to our census lists. When even democracy has to reckon with the fact that its premises are all wrong, and that men are not born equal--that hierarchies are inherent in human kind regardless of birth or opportunity--it proceeds to do its utmost to equalize artificially; it becomes Procrustes. But will any one contend that Procrustes left people free?

Now, what has this to do with culture? Simply this: that culture is not a democratic achievement, because culture is inherently snobbish. Contact with “the best that has been thought and said in the world” makes people intellectually exclusive, and makes them draw distinctions. Those distinctions, seriously speaking, are not founded on social origins or great possessions; they are founded on states of mind. So long as democracy is simply a political matter, culture is left free to select its groups and proclaim its hierarchies. But it is characteristic of our democracy that political equality has not sufficed to it; the “I am as good as you are” formula has been flung out to every horizon. The people with whom it has become a mania insist that their equality with every one else in their range of vision is a moral, an intellectual, a social, as well as a political, equality. Let that formula prevail, and culture, with its eternal distinction-drawing, will naturally die. For contact with the best that has been thought and said in the world induces a mighty humility--and a mighty scorn of those who do not know enough to be humble before the Masters. They are an impersonal humility and an impersonal scorn--attitudes of the mind, both, not of the heart. But humility and scorn are both ruled, theoretically, out of the democratic court.

The pure-bred American once cared for culture, and no longer--to the same extent, at least--does. If any one asks why America (I use the word loosely, as meaning our United States), having always, since the Revolution, been a democracy, can have cared for so undemocratic a thing, the answer is simple. The democracy of our forefathers was a purely pragmatic affair. The Declaration of Independence was framed by men living in a world where it was almost true enough to be workable. Roughly speaking, in pioneer and colonial days--wherever and whoever the pioneers and colonists may be--the community is a democracy because it is an aristocracy. In those grimmer worlds, the fittest do survive because there is no incubator process to keep the feeble going. A pioneer and colonial group, moreover, is apt to be like-minded; people do not exile themselves in each other’s company unless they want the same things. Minor differences of opinion are swallowed up in like major needs: you form coalition governments against savages and famine or a specially detested tyranny. In the modern “I am as good as you are” sense, our ancestors were not democratic at all. They were democratic for their own special group, and a pragmatic truth misled them--as, because we admire them, we are permitting it to mislead us. They were Brahminical in their attitude to learning; they thought it supremely valuable, and they did not believe in--no Brahmin wants to believe in--a royal road to it, any more than they believed in a royal road to the salvation of the soul. They believed in intellectual, as much as they did in spiritual, election; and they certainly did not think that politics could influence either. Up to the last generation or two, they looked upon the cultured man as a peculiarly favored person; and because culture (unlike beauty, let us say) depended to some extent on the effort of the individual, they thought it fit to mention.