Chapter 6
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.