Part 5

This is a question for which I can think of no sensible, logical or respectable answer. Another, to me, absolutely astounding sin of the modern parent is the fashion in which it lets its little girls and boys go to the theater, usually to matinées, regardless of what sort of thing is being performed. The Saturday matinée, apparently, has become an institution, and the child of fourteen or fifteen who is not permitted to buy a box of caramels and sit in the parquet considers himself (much more often herself) a martyr. About six months ago I went to an afternoon performance of “The Merry Widow,” simply because the whole world seemed to be talking about it and I had an erroneous idea that I ought for this reason to hear it. The music I had become sick and tired of; the book I found, by the end of the first act, to be hopelessly dull. I had paid two hard-earned dollars for my seat and I stayed to the end, to the scene at Maxim’s, which, as done in this country, is one of the most altogether nasty things I have ever sat through in a theater. I happen to have been at Maxim’s, on various occasions at every hour from seven in the evening until eight the next morning, but I have never seen there anything so common, so indecent, so beastly as the sort of debauch that took place on the stage of our local theaters. Maxim’s, as everyone knows, is a fashionable brothel, now owned by an English and American stock company. It pays dividends. But never have I discovered there anything that remotely resembled the sort of performance I saw in the Maxim act of our greatly applauded Savage’s “Merry Widow.” I mention it at all, only because sitting next to me was a girl of fourteen whom I have known ever since she was born. When the indecency was at its height, when the orgy had reached a climax, she turned to me and said with a sweet enthusiasm, “It’s awfully good, isn’t it!” Of course she had not the remotest idea of what the affair signified, but why should she have been there in the first place? Why should an American girl of fourteen be introduced to the representation of a Parisian restaurant (to put it most conservatively) represented with infinitely more coarseness than is ever found in the original? She was there because her friends, her “set,” were there. Mamma, abandoning much of her original intelligence, let her go because Muriel Smith and Gladys Jones and Dorothy Robinson always went to the matinée when they wanted to, and their mothers were all women of considerable social importance.

Positively I am aghast when I pause to think of the almost accidental fashion in which so many American children are brought up. Their parents love them and adore them, they do for them everything in the world except what seems to me to be the right thing. Instead of endeavoring to lash them to the good old mast, they have such a way of letting them drift with the contemporary tide! Few things in life are to me at once so engaging, so pathetic and so repellent as a street-car load of boys and girls who have just come from the high school; the girls with their pompadours and their rats, their Latin grammars, their giggling and their ogling; the boys, nice boys, but with such grotesque trousers, flashy shoes and absurd hats. Why doesn’t some one in authority give them less objectionable ideas on the subject of dress, of conduct, of, in short, life? They are really the most dreadful, trashy, tiresome little creatures. It is a constant marvel to me that so many of them, in a few years, without parental or outside aid, abandon their revolting ways and become perfectly good men and women. I admit with gladness that we do seem somehow to muddle through.

Wouldn’t it, however, be better if children were brought up as my suppositious infants are brought up? Or would it in the long run make any particular difference? In the first place, the mother of my children doesn’t spend entire days at country clubs or the houses of friends playing bridge whist. She stays at home a good deal and plays with the children instead, because she likes to and because they like to have her. Few sights are more depressing, give one a more nauseating sensation, cause one to form a lower estimate of humanity, than a roomful of overdressed American mothers hectically playing bridge; and it is a sight one may see almost every day in the year from one end of the country to the other.

In the second place, why should children be allowed to stuff their little insides with candy merely because they seem to like it? A southern cousin of mine used to pick out the best pieces in a box of candy and eat them himself, remarking, “We shall leave the hair-oil and lip-salve varieties for the children, as all children are natural scavengers.” This may be true, but I should protest vehemently against their being allowed to scavenge. That children should be permitted to ruin their digestions, that they should ever be given any form of food that isn’t good for them, strikes me as a parental crime. Parents have the entire matter in their hands; they are, or ought to be, the supreme court, the law. Why not decide for the best instead of for the slipshod half way, or the worst?

Thirdly, I endeavor to give the little creatures for whom I am imaginatively responsible, in addition to robust health, which, after all, one is often inclined to consider the main, the only thing, certain intellectual resources that, even should their health fail later on, they can fall back upon with much enjoyment; resources that later on it is difficult to acquire for oneself. I like them to have an acquaintance with the best books and the greatest pictures, to know just why they are good and great even if they have not actually seen them. I also endeavor to give them a practical knowledge of at least two languages not their own. Every child in our high schools makes a futile stab at French or German. How few make of them a precious possession! As one grows older there is almost no pleasure greater than the ability to read with ease a book in a foreign language; to realize that, while the medium is different, the humanity underlying it is the same. An understanding of foreign languages, more than anything else, helps on the universal brotherhood of man.

Fourthly, I never allow my children to go to the theater because Sissy Jones is allowed to go. Now and then something locally happens that strikes me as amusing, or instructive or, happily, both. We then all go and have a grand time. But why should they be allowed to form the habit of going to everything that comes along? At the dinner to which I have referred, an Irish woman told me she had never been inside of a theater until after her marriage, and she is one of the most charming, highly educated, cultivated women of my acquaintance.

But no doubt my jewels will after all, in spite of me, be the same source of mixed pleasure and responsibility that most jewelry is.

WHAT IS EDUCATION?

Books, the titles of which are interrogatory, always have a fascination for me. “What is Ibsenism?” “Can You Forgive Her?” “What Shall We Do With Our Girls?” for instance. Of course, they are invariably unsatisfactory and, sometimes, exasperating. They never really answer the questions they propound, and they leave one somewhat more muddled than one was before. Tolstoi’s “What is Art?” is a most bigoted and tedious performance. In it one of the greatest artists of modern times elaborately tells one nothing whatever about art, and leaves one with the impression that his claim on immortality is something of which he has become very much ashamed. But, crafty old person though I be, I succumb to them all, and read them because I can’t resist a title in the form of a question.

At present, I am longing for someone to write a book and call it “What Is Education?” What, as a matter of fact, is education? Every few days someone, in endeavoring to describe and sum up someone else, ends with the clinching statement: “And the strange part of it was that he was a man, or she was a woman, of education.” This is supposed to settle the matter--to arouse in one’s mind a definite image. “He was a man of education,” apparently means something, but what? To me it has come to mean nothing at all. A short time ago I read in the morning paper of a dead body that had been found in the river and taken to the county morgue. “All means of identification had been removed,” wrote the reporter, in commenting on the incident, “but,” he added, “the body was evidently that of a man of education.” And, to me, the remarkable part of this was that the reporter, without doubt, had a hazy idea of what he was trying to express. In the poor, dead, unidentified thing he had discovered and recognized something that, to him, implied “education,” but how he did it, and what it was, I don’t know, because he did not explain.

There are in this connection all sorts of questions I hope the author of the book, to which I look forward, will answer. Is, for instance, “a man of education” the same as “an educated man”? Or is one, perhaps, somewhat more--well, more educated than the other? At times both these phrases sound to me as if they meant precisely the same thing, and then again they suddenly, through no wish of mine, develop subtle but important differences that cause first the one and then the other to seem expressive of a higher, a more comprehensive, form of education. Then, too, is there any particular point at which education leaves off and “cultivation” begins? And can a person be “cultivated” without being educated? The words education and cultivation are constantly upon the American tongue, but what do they mean? Or, do they mean something entirely different to everyone who employs them? Every American girl who flirts her way through the high school is “educated,” and it would be indeed a brave man who dared to suggest that she wasn’t. But is she? (Heaven forbid that _I_ should suggest anything; I merely crave information.) And here let me hasten to add that a friend of mine has always maintained, quite seriously, that he likes me in spite of the fact that I am, as he expresses it, “one of the most illiterate persons” of his acquaintance. His acquaintance, it is some slight comfort to remember, is not large, and he is a doctor of philosophy who lectures at one of the great English universities. Not only has he read and studied much, his memory is appalling; he has never forgotten anything. From his point of view I am not “an educated person.” But then, in the opinion of Macaulay, Addison was sadly lacking in cultivation! “He does not appear to have attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and moral writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means equal to his Latin verse,” Macaulay complains in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1843. And while Macaulay admits that “Great praise is due to the notes which Addison appended to his version of the second and third books of the Metamorphoses,” and confess them to be “rich in apposite references to Virgil, Stetius and Claudian,” he cannot understand anyone’s failing to allude to Euripides and Theocritus, waxes indignant over the fact that Addison quoted more from Ausonius and Manilius than from Cicero, and feels positively hurt at his having cited “the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus,” rather than the “authentic narrative of Polybius.” In Rome and Florence--Macaulay continues, more in sorrow than in anger--Addison saw all the best ancient works of art, “without recalling one single verse of Pindar, of Callimachus, or of the Attic dramatists.”

Of course all this is very sad and leaves us quite cross with Addison for having deluded us into believing him to be a person of considerable erudition. How _could_ anybody in the presence of a statue be so absent-minded as not to recall a single verse of Pindar or Callimachus? And how hopelessly superficial must be the mind that actually prefers the languid hexameters of Silius Italicus to the authentic narrative of Polybius! Yet, on the other hand, if we casually referred to Polybius while conversing with most of our educated and even so-called cultivated acquaintances, how many of them, I wonder, would know whether we were talking about a Greek historian or a patent medicine. Macaulay would have considered them hopeless; we (and they) are in the habit (perhaps it is a very bad habit--I don’t know) of regarding them as educated.

Another question that my suppositious author must devote a chapter to, is the difference between just an education and a “liberal” education. We used to hear much more about a “liberal” education than we do now, although Prexy Eliot has of late endeavored to restore the phrase as well as the thing itself. When does an education leave off being penurious, so to speak, and become liberal? According to Mr. Eliot, Milton’s “Areopagitica” helps a lot. I once read Milton’s “Areopagitica” (“but not for love”) with great care, and when I had finished it I had to procure at much trouble and expense another book (written some hundreds of years later) that told me what it was all about. The next day I passed an examination in the subject--and to-day I couldn’t, if my life were at stake, recall the nature or the purpose of the work in question or even explain the meaning of the title. It is possible, of course, that this is more my fault than Milton’s, but whoever is to blame, I can truthfully say that never before or since have I read anything so completely uninteresting or that contributed so little to the liberality of my education. In Mr. Eliot’s opinion, however, and no one more firmly believes in the soundness of Mr. Eliot’s opinions than I do, this ghastly, unintelligible, jaw-breaking relic of the seventeenth century is, if not absolutely essential to a liberal education, at least highly conducive to one. What on earth does it all signify?

Some persons pin their entire faith to a correct use of the pronouns _I_ and _me_. They cheerfully commit every other form of linguistic violence, but as long as they can preserve sufficient presence of mind boldly to say once in so often something like, “He left James and me behind,” instead of resorting to the cowardly “James and myself,” or the elegantly ungrammatical “James and I,” they feel that their educational integrity has been preserved. Others believe that education and true refinement begin and end with always saying, “You would better,” instead of “You had better,” while Mr. Eliot, in musing on the career of Mr. Roosevelt, no doubt remarks to himself, “An estimable, even an interesting man, but is he, after all, conversant with the ‘Areopagitica’?” (I hate to admit it, but I think it highly probable that he is.) And Macaulay, in the book review from which I have quoted, disposes once and for all of a certain scholar named Blackmore--rips open his intellectual back, in fact, by stating with dignified disgust: “Of Blackmore’s attainments in the ancient tongues, it may be sufficient to say that, in his prose, he has confounded an aphorism with an apothegm.” Isn’t it all wonderful? And doesn’t it make you wish that someone would write a work called, “What Is Education?” so you could find out whether you were educated or not?

Of late I have begun to have an ineradical conviction that I am not--and this, not because I have a perverse fondness for the “languid” vocabulary of Silius Italicus (of whom, of course, I never had heard) but because I apparently know so little about the idiom that, by inheritance and environment, I am privileged to call my own. Not long ago, in reading a passage of excellent English prose, I came across a word that suddenly, as words have a devilish way of doing, stood out from the page and challenged me. The word was “nadir.” “At this period he was at the nadir of his fortunes,” was, I think, the sentence in which it occurred, and from the context I was able to divine not the exact meaning of the term, but the general idea it expressed. It meant, I could see, that the person in question had experienced a run of bad luck, that his affairs, for the time being, were in anything but a prosperous condition. But this was very far from knowing the specific meaning of the word “nadir.” It was obviously a noun, and a simple-looking little creature at that, yet I neither knew how to pronounce it nor what it meant. So I made a note of it, intending, later, to inform myself. Further on, I came to the word “apogee,” a familiar combination of letters that suddenly appeared to be perfectly absurd. The gentleman referred to was now no longer at the nadir of his fortunes--he was at the “apogee” of them, and, of course, I was able to guess that something agreeable had happened to him of late. But what, after all, was an apogee? I had often read the word before, and I feel sure that it may be found here and there among my “complete works,” employed with an air of authority. But, upon my soul, I didn’t know what it meant, and, therefore, virtuously made another little note.

Once started upon this mad career of disillusionment, there seemed to be absolutely no end to it, and I read on and on, no longer for the pleasure of reading, but more because the book had become like one of those electric machines with metal handles, where, after turning on the current with a cent, you hang on in interesting agony because you can’t let go. “Not one jot nor tittle!” I groaned as I wrote it down. “Jot,” as a verb, conveyed something to me, but what was it when it became a noun? And what sort of a thing, for heaven’s sake, was a “tittle”? It sounded more like a kitchen utensil than anything else. (Polly, put the tittle on--No, that wouldn’t do.) And why, also, were jots and tittles such inseparable companions? In all my life I had never met a solitary tittle--a tittle walking about alone, so to speak, unaccompanied by a devoted jot. Why was it that when I did meet them, hand in hand, as usual, I didn’t know what they were?

By this time I was beginning to be verbally groggy. What, I wondered, was--or, rather, wasn’t--“a scintilla of evidence”? (For, oddly enough, one is never informed that there is a scintilla of evidence, but merely that there isn’t.) And just how did it happen, in the first place, that a lack of evidence should have been called a “scintilla,” whereas a certain kind of expensive gray fur was called a “chinchilla.” Scintilla chinchilla, scintilla chinchilla--the jury was unable to find a chinchilla of evidence, although Mrs. Vasterbolt was present at the trial in a handsome coat of the costliest scintilla. Why not? But as madness seemed to be lurking in that direction, I hastened feverishly on to “adamant.” Oh, yes, I know it’s something very hard and unyielding and, in the kind of novels that no one reads any more, someone is, at a critical moment, always “as” it--never “like” it. But what is it? It might be some sort of a mythological cliff against which people were supposed ineffectually to have hurled themselves; it might be a kind of metal, or a particularly durable precious stone, or a satisfactory species of paving material. It might be any old thing; I don’t know. What in the dickens does it mean to “dree your own weird”? For, as I almost tore off a page in my anxiety to turn it, my eyes caught sight of: “‘Everyone must dree his own weird,’ she answered, sententiously.” Early in life it had dawned on me that to be told you must “dree your own weird” was merely a more obscure and delicate fashion of telling you that you must “skin your own skunk”; and yet I very much doubt if the verb “to dree” means to skin, or if “weird,” used as a noun, has much connection with the fragrant little denizen of our forests whom we all, I trust, are accustomed to refer to as the _mephitis Americana_.

On and on I toiled for another hour, at the end of which time I had a formidable list of ordinary words belonging to my own language, as to whose real meaning I was completely in the dark. To-day I intended to look them all up and write a charming little paper on them, primarily designed, of course, to make dear reader gasp at the scope and thoroughness of my education. But the day is indescribably hot, and, as I have been away, my dictionary, unfortunately, is gritty with dust. To get up and slap at the corpulent thing with a damp towel would be most repulsive. I shan’t do it. Instead I shall recall that the most intellectual nation in the world has a saying to the effect that, “_On peut être fort instruit sons avoir d’éducation._”

JUST A LETTER

The other day I received a letter from an old friend of mine with whom I have talked for many years now, only in long letters at long intervals. He is a man of about thirty-seven, but he still writes long letters. This one, like all the others, is pleasant in spots, and I have therefore submitted it to a sort of epistolary, dry-cleaning process and extracted some of the spots. Here they are:--

As you see, I am at Newport. I have been visiting various persons here for almost a month now, and as the glory will have soon departed, or rather, as _I_ shall have soon departed, I thought I should give you a vicarious whiff of high life while I can.

It is a rather hot day for Newport, but in this vast and lovely room, at a long window opening on a cliff covered with mauve heather, and with the sea beyond, I don’t in the least mind. I don’t think I should mind anything very much. I don’t even mind that just outside a man is pushing a lawn mower back and forth on the faultless turf, although the sound of his performance makes me feel as if all my teeth were loose. They probably are. Indeed, after a dinner, a late dance, and the remaining few hours of last night spent in playing bridge, my fearless little mirror tells me this morning that I look quite all of twenty-six. One hears much about the follies of the rich, but I am beginning to feel that they are as nothing compared to the follies of the poor. For the paltry sum I last night lost to a man worth eighteen or twenty millions is almost the exact sum I meant to distribute among the servants of my hostess when I gracefully make room for somebody else on the day after tomorrow. Before I began to write to you, I made no end of hectic little calculations on the back of an envelope, but as yet they don’t seem to be leading me anywhere except into the hands of a receiver. However--