The Isolation of the United States—American Ignorance of the
World—Sensitiveness to Criticism—Exaggeration of their Own
Virtues—The Myth of American Chivalrousness—Whence it
Originated—The Climatic Myth—International
Marriages—English Manners and American—The View of Womanhood
in Youth—Co-education of the Sexes—Conjugal Morality—The
Artistic Sense in American Women—Two Stenographers—An
Incident of Camp-Life—"Molly-be-damned"—A Nice Way of
Travelling—How do they do it?—Women in Public Life—The
Conditions which Co-operate—The Anglo-Saxon Spirit again.
It will be roughly true to say that the Englishman's misunderstanding of
America is generally the result of misinformation—of "parsnips"—of
having had reported to him things which are superficial and untrue;
whereas the American's misunderstanding of England is chiefly the result
of his absorption in his own affairs and lack of a standard of
comparison. The Americans as a people have been until recently, and
still are in only a moderately less degree, peculiarly ignorant of other
peoples and of the ways of the world.
This has been unfortunate, so far as their judgment of England is
concerned, in two ways,—first, as has already been said, because they
have had no opportunity of measuring Great Britain against other
nations, so that one and all are equally foreign, and second and more
positively, in the general misconception in the American mind as to the
character and aims of the British Empire and the temper of British rule.
From the same authorities, the popular histories and school manuals, as
supplied the American people for so long with their ideas of the conduct
of the British troops in the Revolutionary War, they also learned of
India and the British; and the one fact which every American, twenty
years ago, knew about British India was that the English blew Sepoys
from the mouths of cannon. Every American youth saw in his school
history a picture of the thing being done. It helped to point the moral
of British brutalities in the War of Independence and it was beaten into
the plastic young minds until an impression was made which was never
effaced. Of late years not a few Americans have arisen to tell the
people something of the truth about British rule in India—of its
uprightness, its beneficence, its tolerance,—but it will be a
generation yet before the people as a whole has any approximate
conception of the facts.
It was in no way to the discredit of the American people—and enormously
to their advantage—that they were for so long ignorant of the world.
How should they have been otherwise when separated from that world by
three thousand miles of ocean? They had, moreover, in the problems
connected with the establishment of their own government, and the
expansion of that government across the continent, enough to occupy
their thoughts and energies. For a century the people lived
self-concentrated, introspective, their minds filled only with thoughts
of themselves. If foreign affairs were discussed at all it was in
curiously childlike and impracticable terms. The nation grew up a
nation of provincials (there is no other word for it), with a
provincialism which was somewhat modified, but still provincial, in the
cities of the Atlantic coast, and which, after all, had a dignity of its
own from the mere fact that it was continent-wide.
The Spanish-American War brought the people suddenly into contact with
the things of Europe and widened their horizon. The war itself was only
an accident; for the growth of American commerce, the increase of
wealth, the uncontainable expansive force of their industrial energy,
must have compelled a departure from the old isolation under any
circumstances. The quarrel with Spain did but furnish, as it were, a
definite taking-off place for the leap which had to be made.[113:1]
Since then, foreign politics and foreign affairs have acquired a new
interest for Americans. They are no longer topics entirely alien from
their every-day life and thoughts. It would still be absurd to pretend
that the affairs of Europe (or for that matter of Asia) have anything
like the interest for Americans that they have for Europeans, or that
the educated American is not as a rule still seriously uninformed on
many matters (all except the bare bones of facts and dates) of
geography, of ethnology, of world-politics which are elementary matters
to the Englishman of corresponding education;[113:2] but with their
début as a World-Power—above all with the acquisition of their
colonial dependencies—Americans have become (I use the phrase in all
courtesy) immensely more intelligent in their outlook on the affairs of
the world. With a longer experience of the difficulties of colonial
government, they will also come to appreciate more nearly at its true
value the work which Great Britain has done for humanity.
Americans may retort that their knowledge of Europe was at least no
scantier than the Englishman's knowledge of America, and the mistakes of
travelling Englishmen in regard to the size, the character, and the
constitution of the country have been a fruitful source of American
witticism. But why should Englishmen know anything of the United
States? The affairs of the United States were, after all, however big,
the affairs of the United States and not of any other part of the rest
of the world; while the affairs of Europe were the affairs of all the
world outside of the United States. Undoubtedly the American could
fairly offset the Englishman's ignorance of America against the
American's ignorance of England; but what has never failed to strike an
Englishman is the American's ignorance of other parts of the world,
which might be regarded as common to both. They were not common to both;
for, as has been said, since the beginning of her history, which has
stretched over some centuries, England has been constantly mixed up with
the affairs, not only of Europe, but of the remoter parts of the earth,
while the United States for the single century of her history has lived
insulated and almost solely intent on her own affairs. So though the
American has no adequate retort against the Englishman for his
ignorance, he need not defend it. It has been an accident of his
geographical situation and needs no more apology than the Rocky
Mountains. But, like the Rocky Mountains, it is a fact which has had a
distinct influence on his character. It is probably unavoidable that a
people—as an individual—which lives a segregated life, with its
thoughts turned almost wholly on itself, should come to exaggerate,
perhaps its own weaknesses, but certainly its virtues.
The boy who lives secluded from companionship, when he goes out into the
world, will find not merely that he is diffident and sensitive about his
own defects, real or imaginary, but that he is different from other
people. It may take him all his life to learn—perhaps he will never
learn—that his emotional and intellectual experiences are no prodigies
of sentiment and phœnixes of thought, but the common experiences of
half his fellows. It has been such a life of seclusion that the American
people lived—though they hardly know it (and perhaps some American
readers will resent the statement), because the mere fact of their
seclusion has prevented them from seeing how secluded, as compared with
other peoples, they have been. It is true that individual Americans of
the well-to-do classes travel more (and more intelligently) than any
other people except the English; but this, as leavening the nation, is a
small off-set against the daily lack of mental contact with foreign
affairs at home.
But if this sheltered boy be further occasionally subjected to the
inspection and criticism of some one from the outside world—a candid
and outspoken elderly relative—he is likely to become, on the one hand,
morbidly sensitive about those things which the other finds to blame,
and, on the other, no less puffed up with pride in whatever is awarded
praise.
Both these tendencies have been acutely developed in the American
character—an extraordinary sensitiveness to criticism by outsiders of
certain national foibles, and a no less conspicuous belief in the heroic
proportions of their good qualities. For surely no people has ever been
blessed in its seclusion with such an abundance of criticism of singular
candour. The frank brutality with which the travelling Englishman has
made his opinions known on any peculiar trait or unusual institution
which he has been pleased to think that he has noticed in the United
States has been vastly more ill-mannered than anything in the manners of
the Americans themselves on which he has animadverted so freely. The
thing most comparable to it—most nearly as ill-mannered—is, perhaps,
the frank brutality with which the travelling American expresses
himself—and herself—in regard to things in Europe. In it, in fact, we
see again another aspect of the same fundamentally English trait,—the
insistence on the sovereignty of the individual—and Americans come by
it legitimately. Every time that they display it they do but make
confession of their original Anglo-Saxon descent and essentially English
nature. The Englishman in America has, however, had some excuse for his
readiness to criticise, in the interest, the anxiety, with which, at
least until recent years, the Americans have invited his opinions. But
if that has gone some way to justify his expression of those opinions,
it has furnished no sort of excuse for the lack of tact and breeding
which he has shown in the process. The American does not commonly wait
for the invitation.
"My! But isn't that quaint! Now in America we . . ." etc. So speaks an
uncultivated American on seeing something that strikes him—or her—as
novel in London, not unkindly critical, but anxious to give information
about his country—and uninvited. But whereas the Englishman is so
accustomed to the abuse and criticism of other peoples that the harmless
chatter of the American ripples more or less unheeded by him, the
American, less case-hardened in his isolation, hears the Englishman's
bluntly worded expression of contempt, and it hurts. It does not hurt
nearly as much now as it did twenty years ago; but the harm has largely
been done.
The harm would not be so serious but for the American sensitiveness
bred of his seclusion,—if that is (at the risk of seeming to repeat
myself I must again say) he knew enough of the world to know that he
himself has precisely the same critical inclination as the Englishman
and that it is a trait inherited from common ancestors. The Anglo-Saxon
race acquired early in its life the conviction that it was a trifle
better than any other section of the human kind. And it is justified.
We—Americans and Englishmen alike—hold that we are better than any
other people. That the root-trait has developed somewhat differently in
the two portions of the family is an accident.
The Englishman—who, when at home, has himself lived, not entirely
secluded, but in a measure shut off from contact with other peoples—by
continual going abroad and never-ceasing friction with his neighbours,
by perpetual disheartenment with the perplexities of his colonial
empire, has become less of a critic than a grumbler; and to do him
justice he is, in speech, infinitely more contemptuous of his own
government than he is of the American or any other. The American on the
contrary remains cheerfully, light-heartedly, garrulously critical. He
comes out in the world and gazes on it young-eyed, and he prattles: "My
father is bigger than your father, and my sister has longer hair than
yours, and my money box is larger than yours." It is neither unkindly
meant nor, by Englishmen, very unkindly taken. It is less offensive than
the mature, corrosive sullenness of the Englishman; but it is the same
thing. "The French foot-guards are dressed in blue and all the marching
regiments in white; which has a very foolish appearance. And as for blue
regimentals, it is only fit for the blue horse or the Artillery," says
the footman in Moore's Zeluco.
Similarly, when he has been praised, the lad has plumed himself unduly
on the thing that found approval. He would not do it now; for the
American people of to-day is, as it were, grown up; but, again, the harm
has been done. Americans rarely make the mistake of underestimating the
excellence of their virtues. Nor is it their fault, but that of their
critics.
The American people labours under delusions about its own character and
qualities in several notable particulars. It exaggerates its own energy
and spirit of enterprise, its sense of humour and its chivalrousness
towards women. That it should be aware that it possesses each of these
qualities in a considerable degree would do no harm, for self-esteem is
good for a nation; but it believes that it possesses them to the
exclusion of the rest of mankind. And that is unfortunate; for it makes
the individual American assume the lack of these qualities in the
English and thereby decreases his estimate of the English character. I
am not endeavouring to reduce the American's good opinion of
himself—only to make him think better of the Englishman by assuring him
that in each of these particulars there is remarkably little to choose
between them. And what excellence he has in each he owes to the fact
that he is in the main English in origin.
That Americans should think that they have a higher respect for
womanhood than any other people is not surprising; for every other
people thinks precisely the same thing. They would be unique among
peoples if they thought otherwise. Frenchman, German, Italian,
Spaniard, Greek—each and every one who has not had his eyes opened by
travel and knowledge of the world believes, with no less sincerity of
conviction than the American, that to him alone of all peoples has it
been vouchsafed to know how duly to reverence the divine feminine. To
the Englishman it seems that the German not seldom treats his wife much
as if she were a cow; and he is sometimes distressed at the way in
which, for all the pretty things he says to her, the Frenchman, not of
the labouring classes only, will allow his wife to work for and wait on
him. While the language which an Italian can, on occasions, use towards
the partner of his joys is, to English ears, appalling. But each goes on
serenely satisfied of his own superiority. You others, you may pay
lip-service, yes; but deep down, in the heart of hearts—we know. The
American has as good a right to this same foible as any other; but what
is to be noted is that whereas Englishmen laugh at the pretensions of
Continental peoples, they have been willing to accept the chivalry of
the American at his own valuation: the fact being that the valuation is
not originally American, but was made by the travelling Englishmen of
the past who communicated their appraisement to the people at home as
well as to the American whom they complimented. Englishmen of the
present day have accepted the belief as an inheritance and without
question; for it was at least a generation and a half ago that the myth
first obtained vogue, and the two facts most commonly adduced in its
support by the English visitors who spread it were, first, that women
could walk about the streets of New York or any other American city,
unattended and at such hours as pleased them, without being insulted;
and, second (absurdly enough), the provision of special "ladies'
entrances" to hotels, which seem to have enormously impressed several
English visitors to the United States who afterwards wrote their
"impressions."
For the first of these, it is a mere matter of local custom and police
regulation. When it is understood that in certain streets of certain
cities, at certain hours of the day, no women walk unattended except
such as desire to be insulted, it is probable that other women, who go
there in ignorance, will suffer inconvenience. Nor has the difference in
local custom any bearing whatever on the respective morality of
different localities. These things are arranged differently in different
countries; that is all. Moreover, in this particular a great change has
come over American cities in late years, nor are all American cities or
all English by any means alike.
A similar change has come in the matter of "ladies' entrances" to
hotels. If the provision of the separate doors was a sign of peculiar
chivalry, are we then to conclude that their disappearance shows that
chivalry is decaying? By no means. It only means that the hotels are
improving. The truth is that as the typical old-fashioned hotel was
built and conducted in America, with the main entrance opening directly
from the street into the large paved lobby, where men congregated at all
hours of the day to talk politics and to spit, where the porters banged
and trundled luggage, and whither, through the door opening to one side,
came the clamour of the bar-room, it was out of the question that women
should frequent that common entrance. Had a hotel constructed and
managed on the same principles been set down in any English town, women
would have declined to use it at all, nor would Englishmen have
expected their womenfolk to do so. Americans avoided the difficulty by
creating the "ladies' entrance." But it was no evidence of superior
chivalry on the part of the people that, having devised a place not fit
for woman's occupancy and more unpleasant than was to be found in any
other part of the world, they provided (albeit rather inadequate) means
by which women could avoid visiting it.
Once I saw two young English girls—sweet girls, tall and graceful, with
English roses blooming in their cheeks—come down-stairs in the evening,
after dinner, as they might have done in any hotel to which they had
been accustomed in Europe, to the lobby of the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New
York. It was a time of some political excitement and there are enough
men living now who remember what the Fifth Avenue Hotel used to be at
such seasons twenty years ago. The girls—it was probably their first
night on American soil and they could not stand being cooped up in their
room upstairs all the evening—made their way to the nearest seat and
sat down clinging each to the other's hand. Around them surged perhaps a
hundred men, chewing, spitting, smoking, slapping each other on the
backs, and laughing coarsely. The girls gazed in wonder and with visibly
increasing embarrassment for perhaps five minutes, before they slipped
away, the roses in their cheeks doubly carmine and still clinging each
to the other's hand.
For the benefit of my companion (whose appearance indicated an
Englishman) an American on an adjoining seat held forth to his friends
on what he called the "indecency" of the conduct of the girls in coming
down to the public hall and the "effrontery" of Englishwomen in
general.
In hotels of the modern type there is no need for women to use a
separate entrance or to draw their skirts aside and hurry through the
public passages. But it is sad if we must conclude that the building of
such hotels is an evidence of dying national chivalry.
Every American firmly believes that he individually, as well as each of
his countrymen, has by heritage a truer respect for womanhood than the
peoples of less happy countries are able to appreciate. But many
Americans also believe that every Englishman is rough and brutal to his
wife, who does daily all manner of menial offices for him, a belief
which is probably akin to the climatic fiction and of Continental
origin. In the old days, when there was no United States of America, the
peoples of the sunny countries of Southern Europe jibed at the English
climate; and with ample justification. English writers have never denied
that justification—in comparison with Southern Europe; and volumes
could be compiled of extracts from English literature, from Shakespeare
downwards, in abuse of British fog and mist and rain. But because Nice
and Naples are entitled to give themselves airs, under what patent do
Chicago and Pittsburgh claim the same right? Why should Englishmen
submit uncomplainingly when Milwaukee and Duluth arrogate to themselves
the privilege of sneering at them which was conceded originally and
willingly enough to Cannes? Riverside in California, Columbia in South
Carolina, Colorado Springs or Old Point Comfort—these, and such as
they, may boast, and no one has ground for protest; but it is time to
"call for credentials" when Buffalo, New Haven, and St. Paul and the
rest propose to come in in the same company. If, in the beginning of
things, English writers had had to compare the British climate not with
that of Europe but with the northern part of the United States, the
references to it in English literature would constitute a hymn of
thanksgiving.
As the case stands, however, the people of all parts of the United
States alike, in many of which mere existence is a hardship for some
months in the year, are firmly convinced that the inhabitants of the
British Isles are in comparison with themselves profoundly to be pitied
for their deplorable climate; and it is probable that the prevailing
idea as to the Englishman's habitual treatment of his wife has much the
same origin. It is an inheritance of the Continental belief that John
Bull sold his womenfolk at Smithfield. The frequency of international
marriages and the continued stream of travel across the Atlantic is, of
course, beginning to correct the popular American point of view, but
there are still millions of honest and intelligent people in the United
States who, when they read that an American girl is going to be married
to an Englishman, pity her from their hearts in the belief that, for the
sake of a coronet or some such bauble, she is selling herself to become
a sort of domestic drudge.
Occasionally also even international marriages turn out unhappily; and
whenever that is the case the American people hear of it in luxuriant
detail. But of the thousands of happy unions nothing is said. Not many
years ago there was a conspicuous case, wherein an American woman, whom
the people of the United States loved much as Englishmen loved the
Empress Frederick or the Princess Alice, failed to find happiness with
an English husband. Of the rights and wrongs of that case, neither I nor
the American people in the mass know anything, but it is the generally
accepted belief in the United States that the lady's husband was some
degrees worse than Bluebeard. I would not venture to hazard a guess at
the number of times that I have heard a conversation on this subject
clinched with the argument: "Well, now, look at N—— G——!" Against
that one instance the stories of a thousand American women who are
living happy lives in Europe would not weigh. If they do not confess
their unhappiness, indeed, "it is probably only because they are proud,
as a free-born American girl should be, and would die rather than to let
others know the humiliations to which they are subjected."
"Oh, yes, you Englishmen!" an American woman will say, "your manners are
better than our American men's and you are politer to us in little
things. But you despise us in your hearts!" It is an argument which, in
anything less than a lifetime, there is no way of disproving. American
men also, of course, habitually comfort themselves with the same
assurance, viz.,—that with less outward show of courtesy, they cherish
in their hearts a higher ideal of womanhood than an Englishman can
attain to. Precisely at what point this possession of a higher ideal
begins to manifest itself in externals does not appear. After twenty
years of intimacy in American homes I have failed to find any trace of
it.
Let me not be misunderstood! I know scores of beautiful homes in the
United States, in many widely sundered cities, where the men are as
courteous, as chivalrous, as devoted to their wives—and where the women
are as sweet and tender to, and as wholly wrapped up in, their
husbands—as in any homes on earth. As I write, the faces of men and
women rise before me, from many thousand miles away, whom I admire and
love as much as one can admire and love one's fellow-beings. There are
these homes I hope and believe—there are noble men and beautiful women
finding and making for themselves and each other the highest happiness
of which our nature is capable—in every country. But we are not now
speaking of the few or of the best individuals, but of averages; and
after twenty years of opportunity for observing I have entirely failed
to find justification for believing that there is any peculiar inward
grace in the American which belies the difference in his outward manner.
This is, of course, only an individual opinion,[126:1] which is
necessarily subject to correction by any one who may have had superior
opportunities for forming a trustworthy judgment. I contend, however,
not as a matter of opinion, but as what seems to me to be a certainty,
that whatever may be the inward feeling in regard to the other sex on
the part of the men of either nation after they have arrived at mature
years, the young Englishman, as he comes to manhood, possesses a much
higher ideal of womanhood than is possessed by the young American of
corresponding age. And I hold to this positively in spite of the fact
that many Americans possessing a large knowledge of transatlantic
conditions may very possibly not admit it.
I rejoice to believe that to the majority of English youths of decent
bringing up at the age at which they commonly leave the public school to
go to the university, womanhood still is a very white and sacred thing,
in presence of which a mere man or boy can but be bashful and awkward
from very reverence and consciousness of inferiority, even as it surely
was a quarter of a century ago and as, at the same time, it as surely
was not to the youth of the United States. Again, of course, in both
countries there are differences between individuals, differences between
sets and cliques; but I am not mistaken about the tone of the English
youth of my own day nor am I mistaken about the tone of the American
youths, of the corresponding class, with whom I have come in intimate
contact in the United States. Their language about, their whole mental
attitude towards, woman was during my first years in America an
amazement and a shock to me. It has never ceased to be other than
repellent.
The greater freedom of contact allowed to the youth of both sexes in the
United States, and above all the co-educational institutions (especially
those of a higher grade), must of course have some effect, whether for
good or ill. It may be that the early-acquired knowledge of the American
youth is in the long run salutary; that his image of womanhood is, as is
claimed, more "practical," and likely to form a better basis for
happiness in life, than the dream and illusion of the English boy; but
here we get into a quagmire of mere speculation in which no individual
opinion has any virtue whatsoever.
I am well aware also of the serious offence that will be given to
innumerable good and earnest people in the United States by what I now
say. This is no place to discuss the question of co-education. I am
speaking only of one aspect of it, and even if it were to be granted
that in that one aspect its results are evil, that evil may very
possibly be outweighed many times over by the good which flows from it
in other directions. Even in expressing the opinion that there is this
one evil result, I am conscious that I shall call down upon myself much
indignation and some contempt. It will be said that I have not studied
the subject scientifically (which may be true) and that I am not
acquainted with what the statistics show (which is less true), and that
my observation has been prejudiced and superficial. Let me say however
that I have been brought to the conclusions to which I have been forced
not by prejudice but against prejudice and when I would have much
preferred to feel otherwise. Let me also say that my condemnation is not
directed against the elementary public schools so much as against that
more select class of co-educational establishments for pupils of less
juvenile years. It would, I think, be interesting to know what
percentage of the girls at present at a given number of such
establishments are the daughters of parents—fathers especially—who
were at those same institutions in their youth. It is a subject
which—so amazed was I, coming with an English-trained mind, at certain
things which were said in incidental conversation—I sought a good many
opportunities of enquiring into; with the result that I know that there
are some parents who, though they had fifty daughters, would never allow
one to go to the institutions at which they themselves spent some years.
And this condemnation covers, to my present memory, five separate
institutions scattered from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River.
"If you marry an American girl," says Life—I quote from memory,—"you
may be sure that you will not be the first man she has kissed. If you
marry an English one, you may be certain you will not be the last."
Whether this is true, viz., that, granting that the American girl is,
before marriage, exposed to more temptation than her English sister, the
latter more than makes up for it in the freedom of married life, is
another quagmire. No statistics, whether of marriage, of divorce, or of
the ratio of increase in population, are of any use as a guide. Each man
or woman, who has had any opportunity of judging, will be guided solely
by the narrow circle of his or her personal experience; and I know that
the man whose opinion on the subject I would most regard holds exactly
opposite views to myself—and what my own may be I trust I may be
excused from stating. But while on the subject of the relative conjugal
morality of the two peoples opinions will differ widely with individual
experience, I have never met a shadow of disagreement in competent
opinion in regard to the facts about the youth of the two countries. It
may be, as I have heard a clever woman say, that the way for a member of
her sex to get the greatest enjoyment out of life is to be brought up in
America and married in England. If so let us rejoice that so many
charming women choose the way which opens to them the possibility of the
greatest felicity.
There is, of course, a widespread impression in England that American
women as a rule are not womanly. The average American girl acquires when
young a self-possession and an ability to converse in company which
Englishwomen only, and then not always, acquire much later in life.
Therefore the American girl appears, to English eyes, to be "forward,"
and she is assumed to possess all the vices which go with "forwardness"
in an English maiden. Which is entirely unjust. Let us remember that
there is hardly a girl growing up in England to-day who would not have
been considered forward and ill-mannered to an almost intolerable degree
by her great-grandmother. But that the girls of to-day are any the less
womanly, in all that is sweet and essential in womanliness, than any
generation of their ancestors, I for one do not believe. Nor do I
believe that in another generation, when they will perhaps, as a matter
of course, possess all the social precocity (as it seems to us) of the
American girl of to-day, they will thereby be any the less true and
tender women than their mothers.
In particular, are American girls supposed to be so commercially
case-hardened that their artistic sensibilities have been destroyed. A
notorious American "revivalist" some years ago returned from a
much-advertised trip to England and told his American congregations of
the sinfulness which he had seen in the Old World. Among other things he
had seen, so he said, more tipsy men and women in the streets of London
in (I think) a month than he had seen in the streets of his native town
of Topeka, Kansas, in some—no matter what—large number of years. Very
possibly he was right. But he omitted to say that he had also seen
several million more sober ones. A population of 6,000,000 frequently
contains more drunkards than one of 30,000. It also contains more
metaphysicians. On the same principle it is entirely likely that the
American girl, who talks so much, says many more foolish things than the
English one who, if she can help it, never talks at all. The American
girl is only a girl after all, and because she has acquired a
conversational fluency which the Englishwoman will only arrive at twenty
years later, it is not just to suppose that she must also have acquired
an additional twenty years' maturity of mind.
Most English readers are familiar with the picture of the American girl
who flits through Europe seeing nothing in the Parthenon or in Whitehall
beyond an inferiority in size and splendour to the last new insurance
company's building in New York. She has been a favourite character in
fiction, and the name of the artist who first imagined her has long been
lost. Perhaps she was Daisy Miller's grandmother. In reality, in spite
of that lack of reverence which is undoubtedly a national American
characteristic, the average American woman has an almost passionate love
for those glories of antiquity which her own country necessarily lacks,
such as few Englishwomen are capable of feeling.
"How in our hearts we envy you the mere names of your streets!" said an
American woman to me once. It is not easy for an English man or woman to
conceive what romance and wonder cluster round the names of Fleet Street
and the Mall to the minds of many educated Americans. We, if we are
away from them for half a dozen years, long for them in our exile and
rejoice in them on our return. The American of sensibility feels that
he—and more especially she—has been cut off from them for as many
generations and adores them with an ardour proportionately magnified.
But he (or she) would not exchange Broadway or Fifth Avenue or Euclid
Avenue or the Lake Shore Drive, as the case may be, for all London.
It was once my fortune to show over Westminster Abbey an American woman
whose name, by reason of her works—sound practical common-sense
works,—has come to be known throughout the United States, and I heard
"the wings of the dead centuries beat about her ears." I took her to
Poet's Corner. She turned herself slowly about and looked at the names
carved on either side of her, and then looked down and saw the names
that lay graven beneath her feet; and she dropped sobbing on her knees
upon the pavement. Johnson was not kind to the American colonies in his
life. Those tears which fell upon his name, where it is cut into the
slab of paving, were part of America's revenge.
We all remember Kipling's "type-writer girl" in San Francisco,—"the
young lady who in England would be a Person,"—who suddenly quoted at
him Théophile Gautier. It is an incident which many Englishmen have read
with incredulity, but which has nothing curious in it to the American
mind. A stenographer in my own offices subsequently, I have heard,
married a rich owner of race-horses and her dinners I understand are
delightful. She was an excellent stenographer.
In all frontier communities, where women are few and the primitive
instincts have freer play than in more artificial societies, there
blossoms a certain rough and ready chivalrousness which sets respect of
womanhood above all laws and makes every man a self-constituted champion
of the sex. This may be seen in a thousand communities scattered over
the farther West; but it is no outgrowth of the American character, for
it flourishes in all new societies in all parts of the world, no matter
to what nationality the men of those societies belong.
In a certain mining camp, late at night, a man—a man of some means, the
son of a banker in a neighbouring town—was walking with a woman.
Neither was sober and the woman fell to the ground. The man kicked her
and told her to get up. As she did not comply he cursed her and kicked
her again. Then chanced to come along one Ferguson, a gambler and a
notoriously "bad man," who bade the other stop abusing the woman,
whereupon he was promptly told to go to —— and mind his own business.
Ferguson replied that if the other touched the woman again he would
shoot him. It was at this point that the altercation brought me out of
my cabin, for the thing was happening almost where my doorstep (had I
had a doorstep) ought to have been. The banker's son paid no heed to the
warning, and once more proceeded to kick the woman. Thereupon Ferguson
shot him. And, with the weapon which Ferguson carried and his ability as
a marksman, when he shot, it might be safely regarded as final.
No attempt was made to punish Ferguson. The deputy sheriff, arriving on
the scene, heard his story and mine and those of one or two others who
had heard or seen more or less of what passed; and Ferguson was a free
man. Nor was there any shadow of a suggestion in camp that justice
should take any other course. The fact was established that the dead man
had been abusing a woman. Ferguson had only done what any other man in
camp must have done under the same circumstances.
And while the banker's son was a person of some standing, there was
certainly nothing in her whom he had maltreated, beyond her mere
womanhood, to constitute a claim on one grain of respect.
I trust that I am not reflecting on the chivalry of the camp when I
record the fact that the name by which the lady was universally known
was "Molly-be-damned." The camp, to a man, idolised her.
One of my earliest revelations of the capacity of the American woman was
vouchsafed to me in this way:
A party of us, perhaps fifteen in all, had travelled a distance of some
two thousand miles to assist at the opening of a new line of railway in
the remote Northwest. We duly arrived at the little mountain town at
which the junction was to be made between the line running up from the
south and that running down from the north, over which we had come. The
ceremony of driving the last spike was conducted with due solemnity,
after which a "banquet" was given to us by the Mayor and citizens of the
small community. After the banquet—which was really a luncheon—we
again boarded our train to complete the run to the southern end of the
line, a number of the citizens of the town with their wives accompanying
us on the jaunt. It chanced to be my privilege to escort to the car,
and for the remainder of the journey to sit beside, the wife of the
editor of the local paper. She was pretty, charming, and admirably
dressed. We talked of many things,—of America and England, of the red
Indians, and of books,—when in a pause in the conversation she
remarked:
"I think this is such a nice way of travelling, don't you?"
It puzzled me. What did she mean? Was she referring to the fact that we
were on a special train composed of private cars, or what? The truth did
not at first occur to me—that she was referring to railway travelling
as a whole, it being the first time that she had ever been on or seen a
train. Explanations followed. She had been brought by her parents, soon
after the close of the Civil War, when two or three years old, across
the plains in a prairie schooner (the high-topped waggon in which the
pioneers used to make their westward pilgrimage), taking some four
months for the trip from the old home in, I think, Kentucky. At all
events she was a Southerner. Since then during her whole life she had
known no surroundings but those of the little mining settlement huddled
in among the mountains, her longest trips from home having been for a
distance of thirty or forty miles on horseback or on a buckboard. She
had lived all her life in log cabins and never known what it meant to
have a servant. She read French and Italian, but could not take any
interest in German. She sketched and painted, and was incomparably
better informed on matters of art than I, though she knew the Masters
only, of course, through the medium of prints and engravings. What she
most dearly longed to do in all the world was to see a theatre—Irving
for choice—and to hear some one of the Italian operas, with the
libretti of which, as well as the music, so far as her piano would
interpret for her, she was already familiar.
Now at last the railway had come and she was, from that day forward,
within some six days' travelling of New York; and her husband had
faithfully promised that they should go East together for at least three
or four weeks that winter. And as she sat and talked in her soft
Southern voice, there in the heart of the wilds which had been all the
world to her, she might, so far as a mere man's eyes could judge, have
been dropped down in any country house in England to be a conspicuously
charming member of any charming house-party.
Familiarity with similar instances, though I think with none more
striking, has robbed the miracle, so far as its mere outward
manifestation is concerned, of something of its wonder; but the inward
marvel of it remains as inexplicable as ever. By what power or instinct
do they do it? With nothing of inheritance, so far as can be judged, to
justify any aspirations towards the good or beautiful, among the poorest
and hardest of surroundings, with none but the most meagre of
educational facilities, by what inherent quality is it that the American
woman, not now and again only, but in her tens of thousands, rises to
such an instinctive comprehension of what is good and worth while in
life, that she becomes, not through any external influence, but by mere
process of her own development, the equal of those who have spent their
lives amid all that is most beautifying and elevating of what the world
has to afford? When she takes her place, graciously and composedly, as
the mistress of some historic home or amid the surroundings of a Court,
we say that it is her "adaptability." But adaptability can do no more
than raise one to the level of one's surroundings—not above them. Is it
ambition? But whence derived? And by what so tutored and guided that it
reaches only for what is good? How is it tempered that she remains all
pure womanly at the last?
It may be that the extent to which, especially in the Western States,
American women of wealth and position are called upon to bear their
share in public work—in the management of art societies, the building
of art buildings and public libraries, the endowment and conduct of
hospitals, and in educational work of all kinds—gives them such an
opportunity of showing the qualities which are in them, as is denied to
their English sisters of similar position but who live in older
established communities. And there are, of course, women in England who
lead lives as beautiful and as beneficent as are lived anywhere upon
earth. The miracle is that the American woman—and, again I say, not now
and again but in her tens of thousands—becomes what she is out of the
environment in which her youth has so often been lived.
It will be necessary later to refer to the larger part played by
American women, as compared with English, in the intellectual life of
the country,—a matter which itself has, as will be noticed, no little
bearing on the question of the merits and demerits of the co-education
of the sexes. The best intellectual work, the best literary work, the
best artistic work, is still probably done by the men in the United
States; but an immensely larger part of that work is done by women than
in England, and in ordinary society (outside of the professional
literary and artistic circles) it is the women who are generally best
informed, as will be seen, on literature and art. To which is to be
added the fact that they take a much livelier and more intelligent
interest than do the majority of Englishwomen in public affairs, and
assume a more considerable share of the work of a public or quasi-public
character in educational and similar matters. It might be supposed that
this greater prominence of women in the national life of the country was
in itself a proof that men deferred more to them and placed them on a
higher level; but when analysed it will be found far from being any such
proof. Rather is woman's position an evidence of, and a result of, man's
neglect. By which it is not intended to imply any discourteous or
inconsiderate neglect; but merely that American men have been, and still
are, of necessity more busy than Englishmen, more absorbed in their own
work, whereby women have been left to live their own lives and thrown on
their own resources much more than in England. The mere pre-occupation
of the men, moreover, necessarily leaves much work undone which, for the
good of society, must be done; and women have seized the opportunity of
doing it. They have been especially ready to do so, inasmuch as the
spirit of work and of pushfulness is in the atmosphere about them, and
they have been educated at the same schools as the men. The contempt of
men for idleness, in a stage of society when there was more than enough
work for all men to do, necessarily extended to the women. It is not
good, in the United States, for any one, woman hardly more than man, to
be idle.
Women being compelled to organise their own lives for themselves, they
carried into that organisation the spirit of energy and enthusiasm which
filled the air of the young and growing communities. Finding work to
their hands to do, they have done it—taking, and in the process fitting
themselves to take, a much more prominent part in the communal life than
is borne by their sisters in England or than those sisters are to-day,
in the mass, qualified to assume. Precisely so (as often in English
history) do women, in some beleaguered city or desperately pressed
outpost, turn soldiers. No share in, or credit for, the result is to be
assigned to any peculiar forethought, deference, or chivalrousness on
the part of the men, their fellows in the fight. It is to the women that
credit belongs.
And while we are thus comparing the position of women in America with
their position in England, it is to be noted that so excellent an
authority among Frenchmen as M. Paul Cambon, in speaking of the position
of women in England, uses precisely the same terms as an Englishman must
use when speaking of the conditions in America. Americans have gone a
step farther—are a shade more "Feminist"—than the English, impelled,
as has been seen, by the peculiar conditions of their growing
communities in a new land. But it is only a step and accidental.
Englishmen looking at America are prone to see only that step, whereas
what Frenchmen or other Continental Europeans see is that both
Englishmen and Americans together have travelled far, and are still
travelling fast, on a path quite other than that which is followed by
the rest of the peoples. In their view, the single step is
insignificant. What is obvious is that in both is working the same
Anglo-Saxon trait—the tendency to insist upon the independence of the
individual. Feminism—the spirit of feminine progress—is repugnant to
the Roman Catholic Church; and we would not look to see it developing
strongly in Roman Catholic countries. But, what is more important, it is
repugnant to all peoples which set the community or the state or the
government before the individual, that is to say to all peoples except
the Anglo-Saxon.
We see here again, as we shall see in many things, how powerless have
been all other racial elements in the United States to modify the
English character of the people. The weight of all those elements must
be, and, so far as they have any weight, is directly against the
American tendency to feminine predominance. All the Germans, all the
Irish, all the Frenchmen, Spaniards, Italians, or other foreigners who
are in the United States to-day or have ever come to the United States
have not, as Germans, or Irish, or Frenchmen, contributed among them one
particle, one smallest impulse, to the position which women hold in the
life of the country to-day; rather has it been achieved in defiance of
the instincts and ideas of each of those by the English spirit which
works irrepressibly in the people. There could hardly be stronger
testimony to the dominating quality of that spirit. One may approve of
the conditions as they have been evolved; or one may not. One may be
Feminist or anti-Feminist. But whether it be for good or evil, the
position which women hold in the United States to-day they hold by
virtue of the fact that the American people is Anglais—an English or
Anglo-Saxon people.
And in spite of all the precautions that I have taken to make myself
clear and to avoid offence, I feel that some word of explanation, lest I
be misunderstood, is still needed. It is not here said that American men
do not place woman on a higher plane than any Continental European
people. I earnestly believe that both branches of the Anglo-Saxon stock
do hold to a higher ideal of womanhood than some (and for all I know to
the contrary, than all) of the peoples of Europe. What I am denying is
that Americans have any greater reverence for women, any higher
chivalrousness, than Englishmen. And this denial I make not with any
desire to belittle the chivalry of American men but only in the
endeavour to correct the popular American impression about Englishmen,
which does not contribute to the promotion of that good-will which ought
to exist between the peoples. I am not suggesting that Americans should
think less of themselves, only that, with wider knowledge, they would
think better of Englishmen.
And, on the subject of co-education, it seems that yet another word is
needed, for since this chapter was put into type, it has had the
advantage of being read by an American friend whose opinion on any
subject must be valuable, and who has given especial attention to
educational matters. He thinks it would be judicious that I should make
it clearer than I have done that, in what I have said, I am not
criticising the American co-educational system in any aspect save one.
He writes:
"The essential purpose of the system of co-education which had been
adopted, not only in the State universities supported by public funds,
but in certain colleges of earlier date, such as Oberlin, in Ohio, and
in comparatively recent institutions like Cornell University, of New
York, is to secure for the women facilities for training and for
intellectual development not less adequate than those provided for the
men.
"It was contended that if any provision for higher education for women
was to be made, it was only equitable, and in fact essential, that such
provision should be of the best. It was not practicable with the
resources available in new communities, to double up the machinery for
college education, and if the women were not to be put off with
instructors of a cheaper and poorer grade and with inadequate
collections and laboratories, they must be admitted to a share of the
service of the instructors, and in the use of the collections, of the
great institutions.
"It is further contended by well-informed people that what they call a
natural relation between the sexes, such as comes up in the competitive
work of university life, so far from furthering, has the result of
lessening the risk of immature sentiment and of undesirable flirtations.
By the use of the college system, the advantages of these larger
facilities can be secured to women, and have in fact been secured
without any sacrifice of the separate life of the women students.
"In Columbia University, for instance (in New York City), the women
students belong to Barnard College. This college is one of the seven
colleges that constitute Columbia University: but it possesses a
separate foundation and a faculty of its own. The women students have
the advantage of the university collections and of a large number of the
university lectures. The relation between the college and the university
is in certain respects similar to that of Newnham and Girton with the
University of Cambridge, with the essential difference that Barnard
College constitutes, as stated, an integral part of the university, and
that the Barnard students are entitled to secure their university
degrees from A.B. to Ph.D."
From the above it is by no means certain that on the one point on which
I have dwelt, his opinion coincides with mine; and the best explanation
thereof that I can offer is that while he knows certain parts of the
country and some institutions better than I, I know certain parts of the
country and some institutions better than he. And we will "let it go at
that."
As for the rest, for the general economic advantages of the
co-educational system to the community, I think I am prepared to go as
far as almost anyone. I am even inclined to follow Miss M. Carey Thomas,
the President of Bryn Mawr College, who attributes the industrial
progress of the United States largely to the fact that the men of the
country have such well-educated mothers. It seems to me a not
unreasonable or extravagant suggestion. I am certainly of the opinion
that the conversational fluency and mental alertness of the American
woman, as well as in large measure her capacity for bearing her share in
the civic labour, are largely the result of the fact that she has in
most cases had precisely the same education as her brothers.
At present I believe that something more than one-half (56 per cent.) of
the pupils in all the elementary and secondary schools, whether public
or private, in the United States are girls; and that the system is
permanently established cannot be questioned. What are known as the
State universities, that is to say universities which are supported
entirely, or almost entirely, by State grants, or by annual taxes
ordered through State legislation, have from their first foundation been
available for women students as well as for men. The citizens, who, as
taxpayers, were contributing the funds required for the foundation and
the maintenance of these institutions, took the ground, very naturally,
that all who contributed should have the same rights in the educational
advantages to be secured. It was impossible from the American point of
view to deny to a man whose family circle included only daughters the
university education, given at public expense, which was available for
the family of sons.
Co-education had its beginning in most parts of the United States in the
fact that in the frontier communities there were often not enough boy
pupils to support a school nor was there enough money to maintain a
separate school for girls; but what began experimentally and as a matter
of necessity has long become an integral part of the American social
system. So far from losing ground it is continually (and never more
rapidly than in recent years) gaining in the Universities as well as in
the schools, in private as well as public institutions.
But, as I said in first approaching the subject, the merits or demerits
of co-education are not a topic which comes within the scope of this
book. It was necessary to refer to it only as it impinged on the general
question of the relation of the sexes.
