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Title: The Meccas of the World
The Play of Modern Life in New York, Paris, Vienna, Madrid and
London
Author: Anne Warwick
Release Date: February 6, 2022 [eBook #67346]
Language: English
Produced by: Juliet Sutherland, Charlie Howard, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MECCAS OF THE WORLD ***
THE MECCAS OF THE WORLD
ANNE WARWICK
BOOKS BY ANNE WARWICK
_COMPENSATION_
_$1.30 net_
_THE UNKNOWN WOMAN_
_$1.30 net_
JOHN LANE COMPANY
PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
AN AMERICAN ALLEGORY: FIVE HUNDRED FEET ABOVE HIS SKYSCRAPER, AND STILL
CLIMBING!]
THE MECCAS OF
THE WORLD
THE PLAY OF MODERN LIFE IN
NEW YORK, PARIS, VIENNA,
MADRID AND LONDON
BY
ANNE WARWICK
AUTHOR OF “THE UNKNOWN WOMAN,” “COMPENSATION,” ETC.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
JOHN LANE COMPANY
MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY
JOHN LANE COMPANY
TO
MY FATHER
CONTENTS
PART I
IN REHEARSAL
(New York)
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Cast 3
II. Convenience vs. Culture 16
III. Off Duty 30
IV. Miss New York, Jr. 44
V. Matrimony & Co. 59
PART II
THE CURTAIN RISES
(Paris)
I. On the Great Artiste 77
II. On Her Everyday Performance 90
III. And Its Sequel 107
PART III
THE CHILDREN’S PERFORMANCE
(Vienna)
I. The Playhouse 127
II. The Players Who Never Grow Old 139
III. The Fairy Play 153
PART IV
THE BROKEN-DOWN ACTOR
(Madrid)
I. His Corner Apart 173
II. His Arts and Amusements 187
III. One of His Big Scenes 205
IV. His Foibles and Finenesses 215
PART V
IN REVIEW
(London)
I. The Critics 235
II. The Judgment 248
ILLUSTRATIONS
AN AMERICAN ALLEGORY _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
AFTERNOON PARADE ON FIFTH AVENUE 10
A PATCH OF THE CRAZY QUILT 14
“NEW YORK’S FINEST.” 30
AMERICAN WOMAN GOES TO WAR 58
THE TRIUMPHANT “THIRD SEX” TAKES WASHINGTON 66
OPEN-AIR BALL ON THE 14TH JULY 82
L’HEURE DU RENDEZ-VOUS 110
THE SOUL OF OLD SPAIN 173
THE QUEEN OF SPAIN AND PRINCE OF ASTURIAS 184
FAIR ENTHUSIASTS AT THE BULL-FIGHT 190
THE SUPREME MOMENT 192
A TYPICAL POSTURE OF THE SPANISH DANCE 204
THE ROYAL FAMILY OF SPAIN AFTER A CHAPEL SERVICE 210
KING ALFONSO SWEARING-IN RECRUITS, APRIL 13, 1913 212
“THE RESTFUL SWEEP OF PARKS” 235
LONDON: THE EMPIRE CAPITAL 252
THE GREAT ISLAND SITE 256
LINKING THE NEW ERA AND THE OLD 258
PROLOGUE
A play is a play in so much as it furnishes a fragment of actual life.
Being only a fragment, and thus literally torn out of the mass of
life, it is bound to be sketchy; to a certain extent even superficial.
Particularly is this the case where the scene shifts between five
places radically different in elements and ideals. The author can only
present the (to her) most impressive aspects of the several pictures,
trusting to her sincerity to bridge the gaps her enforced brevity must
create. And first she invites you to look at the piece in rehearsal.
I
IN REHEARSAL
(New York)
I
THE CAST
Thanks to the promoters of _opéra bouffe_ we are accustomed as a
universe to screw our eye to a single peep-hole in the curtain that
conceals a nation, and innocently to accept what we see therefrom as
typical of the entire people. Thus England is generally supposed to be
inhabited by a blond youth with a top-hat on the back of his head, and
a large boutonnière overwhelming his morning-coat. He carries a loud
stick, and says “Ah,” and is invariably strolling along Piccadilly.
In France, the youth has grown into a bad, bold man of thirty--a
_boulevardier_, of course--whose features consist of a pair of inky
moustaches and a wicked leer. He sits at a table and drinks absinthe,
and watches the world go by. The world is never by chance engaged
elsewhere; it obligingly continues to go by.
Spain has a rose over her ear, and listens with patience to a perpetual
guitar; Austria forever is waltzing upstairs, while America is known
to be populated by a sandy-haired person of no definite age or
embellishments, who spends his time in the alternate amusements of
tripling his fortune and ejaculating “I guess!” He has a white marble
mansion on Fifth Avenue, and an office in Wall Street, where daily he
corners cotton or sugar or crude oil--as the fancy strikes him. And he
is bounded on every side by sky-scrapers.
Like most widely accepted notions, this is picturesque but untrue. The
Americans of America, or at least the New Yorkers of New York, are not
the handful of men cutting off coupons in mahogany offices “down-town”;
nor the silken, sacheted women gliding in and out of limousines, with
gold purses. They are the swarm of shop-keepers and “specialists,”
mechanics and small retailers, newspaper reporters and petty clerks,
such as flood the Subways and Elevated railways of New York morning
and night; fighting like savages for a seat. They are the army of
tailors’ and shirt-makers’ and milliners’ girls who daily pour through
the cross-streets, to and from their sordid work; they are the palely
determined hordes who batter at the artistic door of the city, and live
on nothing a week. They are the vast troops of creatures born under a
dozen different flags, whom the city has seduced with her golden wand,
whom she has prostituted to her own greed, whom she will shortly fling
away as worthless scrap--and who love her with a passion that is the
root and fibre of their souls.
So much for the actual New Yorkers, as contrasted with the gilded
nonentity of musical comedy and best-selling fiction. As for New York
itself, it has the appearance of behind the scenes at a gigantic
theatre. Coming into the harbour is like entering the house of a
great lady by the back door. Jagged rows of match-like buildings
present their blank rear walls to the river, or form lurid bills of
advertisement for somebody’s pork and beans; huge barns of ferry
terminuses overlap with their galleries the narrow streets beneath;
slim towers shoot up, giddy and dazzling-white, in the midst of grimy
tenements and a hideous black network of elevated railways; the domes
of churches and of pickle factories, the turrets of prisons and of
terra cotta hotels, the electric signs of theatres and of cemetery
companies, are mingled indiscriminately in a vast, hurled-together
heap. While everywhere great piles of stone and steel are dizzily
jutting skyward, ragged and unfinished.
It is plain to be seen that here life is in preparation--a piece in
rehearsal; with the scene-shifters a bit scarce, or untutored in their
business. One has the uncomfortable sensation of having been in too
great haste to call; and so caught the haughty city on her moving-in
day. This breeds humility in the visitor, and indulgence for the poor
lady who is doing her best to set her house to rights. It is a splendid
house, and a distinctly clever lady; and certainly in time they will
adjust themselves to one another and to the world outside. For the
present they loftily enjoy a gorgeous chaos.
Into this the stranger is landed summarily, and with no pause of
railway journey before he attacks the city. London, Paris, Madrid,
may discreetly withdraw a hundred miles or more further from the
impatient foreigner: New York confronts him brusquely on the pier.
And from his peaceful cabin he is plunged into a vortex of hysterical
reunions, rushing porters, lordly customs officials, newspaper men,
express-agents, bootblacks and boys shouting “Tel-egram!” He has been
on the dock only five minutes, when he realizes that the dock itself is
unequivocally, uncompromisingly New York.
Being New York, it has at once all the conveniences and all the
annoyances known to man, there at his elbow. One can talk by long
distance telephone from the pier to any part of the United States; or
one can telegraph a “day letter” or a “night letter” and be sure of its
delivery in any section of the three-thousand mile continent by eight
o’clock next morning. One can check one’s trunks, when they have passed
the customs, direct to one’s residence--whether it be Fifth Avenue,
New York, or Nob Hill, San Francisco; time, distance, the clumsiness
of inanimate things, are dissipated before the eyes of the dazzled
stranger.
On the other hand, before even he has set foot on American soil, he
becomes acquainted with American arrogance, American indifference,
the fantasy of American democracy. The national attitude of
I-am-as-good-as-you-are has been conveyed to him through the surly
answers of the porter, the cheerful familiarity of the customs
examiner, the grinning impudence of the express-man. These excellent
public servants would have the foreigner know once and for all that he
is in a land where all men are indisputably proven free and equal,
every minute. The extremely interesting fact that all men are most
unequal--slaves to their own potentialities--has still to occur to the
American. He is in the stage of doing, not yet of thinking; therefore
he finds disgrace in saying “sir” to another man, but none in showing
him rudeness.
In a civilization like that of America, where the office-boy of today
is the millionaire of tomorrow, and the millionaire of today tomorrow
will be begging a job, there cannot exist the hard and fast lines
which in older worlds definitely fix one man as a gentleman, another
as his servant. Under this management of lightning changes, the most
insignificant of the chorus nurses (and with reason) the belief that
he may be jumped overnight into the leading rôle. There is something
rather fine in the desperate self-confidence of every American in the
ultimate rise of his particular star. Out of it, I believe, grows much
of that feverish activity which the visitor to New York invariably
records among his first impressions. One has barely arrived, and been
whirled from the dock into the roar and rush of Twenty-third Street and
Broadway, when he begins to realize the relentless energy of the place.
The very wind sweeps along the tunnel-like streets, through the rows of
monster buildings, with a speed that takes the breath. In the fiercest
of the gale, at the intersection of the two great thoroughfares of
Fifth Avenue and Broadway, rises the solid, serene bulk of the Flatiron
Building--like a majestic Wingèd Victory breasting the storm. Over to
the right, in Madison Square, Metropolitan Tower rears its disdainful
white loftiness; far above the dusky gold and browns of old Madison
Square Garden; above the dwarfed Manhattan Club, the round Byzantine
dome of the Madison Square Presbyterian Church. But the Flatiron itself
has the proudest site in New York; facing, to the north, on one side
the tangle and turmoil of Broadway--its unceasing whirr of business,
business, business; on the other side, the broad elegance and dignity
of Fifth Avenue, with its impressive cavalcade of mounted police. While
East and West, before this giant building, rush the trams and traffic
of Twenty-third Street; and to the South lie the arches of aristocratic
old Washington Square.
It is as though at this converging point one gathers together all the
outstanding threads in the fabric of the city, to visualize its central
pattern. And the outstanding types of the city here are gathered also.
One sees the ubiquitous “businessman,” in his careful square-shouldered
clothes, hurrying from bus to tram, or tearing down-town in a taxi;
the almost ubiquitous business-woman, trig and quietly self-confident,
on her brisk up-town walk to the office; and the out-of-town woman
“shopper,” with her enormous hand-bag, and the anxious-eyed Hebrew
“importer” (whose sign reads _Maison Marcel_), and his stunted little
errand-girl darting through the maze of traffic like a fish through
well-known waters; the idle young man-about-town, immortalized in the
sock and collar advertisements of every surface car and Subway; and the
equally idle young girl, in her elaborate sameness the prototype of the
same cover of the best magazines: even in one day, there comes to be a
strange familiarity about all these people.
They are peculiar to their own special class, but within that class
they are as like as peas in a pod. They have the same features, wear
the same clothes even to a certain shade, and do the same things in
identically the same day. With all about them shifting, progressing,
alternating from hour to hour, New Yorkers, in themselves, remain
unaltered. Or, if they change, they change together as one creature--be
he millionaire or Hebrew shop-keeper, doctor of divinity or manager of
comic opera. For, of all men under the sun, the New Yorker is a type;
acutely suspicious of and instinctively opposed to anything independent
of the type. Hence, in spite of the vast numbers of different peoples
brought together on Manhattan Island, we find not a community of
Americans growing cosmopolitan, but a community of cosmopolitans forced
to grow New Yorkers. This, under the potent influence of extreme
American adaptability, they do in a remarkably short time; the human
potpourri who five years ago had never seen Manhattan, today being
indistinguishable in the representative city mass.
Walk out Fifth Avenue at the hour of afternoon parade, or along
Broadway on a matinée day: the habitués of the two promenades differ
only in degree. Broadway is blatant. Fifth Avenue is desperately
toned-down. On Broadway, voices and millinery are a few shades more
strident, self-assertion a few shades more arrogant than on the less
ingenuous Avenue. Otherwise, what do you find? The same over-animated
women, the same over-languid young girls; wearing the same velvets and
furs and huge corsage bouquets, and--unhappily--the same pearl powder
and rouge, whether they be sixteen or sixty, married or demoiselle.
Ten years ago New York could boast the loveliest, naturally beautiful
galaxy of young girls in the world; today, since the onslaught of
French fashion and artificiality, this is no longer true. On the other
hand, it is pitiable to see the hard painted lines and fixed smile of
the women of the world in the faces of these girls of seventeen and
eighteen who walk up and down the Avenue day after day to stare and be
stared at with almost the boldness of a boulevard _trotteuse_.
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
THE AFTERNOON PARADE ON FIFTH AVENUE]
Foreigners who watch them from club windows write enthusiastic
eulogies in their praise. To me they seem a terrible travesty on all
that youth is meant to be. They take their models from pictures of
French demi-mondaines shown in ultra-daring race costumes, in the
Sunday newspapers; and whom they fondly believe to be great ladies of
society. I had almost said that from head to foot they are victims of
an entirely false conception of beauty and grace; but when it comes to
their feet, they are genuine American, and, so, frank and attractive.
Indeed there is no woman as daintily and appropriately shod as the
American woman, whose trim short skirts betray this pleasant fact with
every step she takes.
Nowhere, however, is appearance and its detail more misrepresentative
than in New York. Strangers exclaim at the opulence of the frocks
and furs displayed by even the average woman. They have no idea that
the average woman lives in a two-by-four hall bedroom--or at best a
three-room flat; and that she has saved and scrimped, or more probably
gone into debt to acquire that one indispensable good costume. Nor
could they imagine that her chief joy in a round of sordid days is
parade in it as one of the luxurious throng that crowd Fifth Avenue and
its adjacent tea-rooms from four till six every afternoon.
Not only the women of Manhattan itself revel in this daily scene; but
their neighbors from Brooklyn, Staten Island, Jersey City and Newark
pour in by the hundreds, from the underground tubes and the ferries
that connect these places with New York. The whole _raison d’être_ of
countless women and girls who live within an hour’s distance of the
city is this everyday excursion to their Mecca: the leisurely stroll up
Fifth Avenue from Twenty-third Street, down from Fifty-ninth; the cup
of tea at one of the rococo hotels along the way. It is a routine of
which they never seem to tire--a monotony always new to them. And the
pathetic part of it is that while they all--the indigent “roomers,” the
anxious suburbanites, and the floating fraction of tourists from the
West and South--fondly imagine they are beholding the Four Hundred of
New York society, they are simply staring at each other!
And accepting each other naïvely at their clothes value. The woman
of the hall bedroom receives the same appreciative glance as the
woman with a bank account of five figures; provided that outwardly
she has achieved the same result. The prime mania of New York is
results--or what appear to be results. Every sky-scraper in itself is
an exclamation-point of accomplishment. And the matter is not how one
accomplishes, but how much; so that the more sluggish European can feel
the minutes being snatched and squeezed by these determined people
round him and made to yield their very utmost before being allowed to
pass into telling hours and days.
With this goes an air of almost offensive competency--an air that is
part of the garments of the true New Yorker; as though he and he alone
can compass the affair towards which he is forever hurrying. There is
about him, always, the piquant insinuation that he is keeping someone
waiting; that he can. I have been guilty of suspecting that this
attitude, together with his painstakingly correct clothes, constitute
the chief elements in the New Yorker’s game of “bluff.” Let him wear
what the ready-made tailor describes as “snappy” clothes, and he is
at once respected as successful. A man may be living on one meal a
day, but if he can contrive a prosperous appearance, together with the
preoccupied air of having more business than he can attend to, he is
in the way of being begged to accept a position, at any moment.
No one is so ready to be “bluffed” as the American who spends his
life “bluffing.” In him are united the extremes of ingenuousness and
shrewdness; so that often through pretending to be something he is
not, he does actually come to be it. A Frenchman or a German or an
Englishman is born a barber; he remains a barber and dies a barber,
like his father and grandfather before him. His one idea is to be the
best barber he can be; to excell every other barber in his street. The
American scorns such lack of “push.” If his father is a barber, he
himself learns barbering only just well enough to make a living while
he looks for a “bigger job.” His mind is not on pleasing his clients,
but on himself--five, ten, twenty years hence.
He sees himself a confidential clerk, then manager’s assistant, then
manager of an independent business--soap, perhaps; he sees himself
taken into partnership, his wife giving dinners, his children sent
to college. And so vivid are these possibilities to him, reading and
hearing of like histories every day in the newspapers and on the
street, that unconsciously he begins to affect the manners and habits
of the class he intends to make his own. In an astonishingly short time
they are his own; which means that he has taken the main step towards
the realization of his dream. It is the outward and visible signs of
belonging which eventually bring about that one does belong; and no
one is quicker to grasp this than the obscure American. He has the
instincts of the born climber. He never stops imitating until he dies;
and by that time his son is probably governor of the State, and his
daughter married to a title. What a people! As a Frenchman has put it,
“_il n’y a que des phenomènes!_”
One cannot conclude an introductory sketch of some of their phenomena
without a glance at their amazing architecture. The first complacent
question of the newspaper interviewer to every foreigner is: “What do
you think of our sky-scrapers?” And one is certainly compelled to do
a prodigious deal of thinking about them, whether he will or no. For
they are being torn down and hammered up higher, all over New York,
till conversation to be carried on in the street must needs become a
dialogue in monosyllabic shouts; while walking, in conjunction with
the upheavals of new Subway tunnelling, has all the excitements of
traversing an earthquake district.
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
A PATCH OF THE CRAZY-QUILT BROADWAY, FROM 42d STREET]
This perpetual transition finds its motive in the enormous business
concentrated on the small island of Manhattan, and the constant
increase in office space demanded thereby. The commerce of the
city persistently moves north, and the residents flee before it;
leaving their fine old Knickerbocker homes to be converted into
great department stores, publishing houses, but above all into the
omnivorous office-building. The mass of these are hideous--dizzy,
squeezed-together abortions of brick and steel--but here and there
among the horrors are to be found examples of true if fantastic beauty.
The Flatiron Building is one, the Woolworth Building (especially
in its marvellous illumination by night) another, the new colonnaded
offices of the Grand Central Station a third. Yet the general
impression of New York architecture upon the average foreigner is of
illimitable confusion and ugliness.
It is because the American in art is a Futurist. He so far scorns the
ideal as to have done with imagination altogether; substituting for it
an invention so titanic in audacity that to the untrained it appears
grotesque. In place of the ideal he has set up the one thing greater:
truth. And as truth to every man is different (only standard being
relatively fixed) how can he hope for concurrence in his masterpiece?
The sky-scraper is more than a masterpiece: it is a fact. A fact of
violence, of grim struggle, and of victory; over the earth that is
too small, and the winds that rage in impotence, and the heavens that
heretofore have been useless. It is the accomplished fact of man’s
dauntless determination to wrest from the elements that which he sees
he needs; and as such it has a beauty too terrible to be described.
II
CONVENIENCE _VS._ CULTURE
Here are the two prime motives waging war in the American drama of
today. Time is money; whether for the American it is to mean anything
more is still a question. Meanwhile every time-saving convenience that
can be invented is put at his disposal, be he labouring man or governor
of a state. And, as we have seen in the case of the sky-scraper, little
or no heed is paid to the form of finish of the invention; its beauty
is its practicability for immediate and exhaustive use.
Take that most useful of all, for example: the hotel. An Englishman
goes to a hotel when he is obliged to, and then chooses the quietest he
can find. Generally it has the appearance of a private house, all but
the discreet brass plate on the door. He rings for a servant to admit
him; his meals are served in his rooms, and weeks go by without his
seeing another guest in the house. The idea is to make the hotel in as
far as possible duplicate the home.
In America it is the other way round; the New Yorker in particular
models his home after his hotel, and seizes every opportunity to
close his own house and live for weeks at a time in one of the huge
caravanseries that gobble up great areas of the city. “It is so
convenient,” he tells you, lounging in the gaudy lobby of one of these
hideous terra-cotta structures. “No servant problem, no housekeeping
worries for madame, and everything we want within reach of the
telephone bell!”
Quite true, when the pompadoured princess below-stairs condescends to
answer it. Otherwise you may sit in impotent rage, ten stories up,
while she finishes a twenty-minute conversation with her “friend”
or arranges to go to a “show” with the head barber; for in all this
palace of marble staircases and frescoed ceilings, Louis Quinze suites
and Russian baths there is not an ordinary bell in the room to call a
servant. Everything must be ordered by telephone; and what boots it
that there is a telegraph office, a stock exchange bureau, a ladies’
outfitting shop, a railroad agency, a notary, a pharmacist and an
osteopath in the building--if to control these conveniences one must
wander through miles of corridors and be shot up and down a dozen
lifts, because the telephone girl refuses to answer?
From personal experience, I should say that the servant problem is
quite as tormenting in hotels as in most other American establishments.
The condescension of these worthies, when they deign to supply you
with some simple want, is amazing. Not only in hotels, but in well-run
private houses, they seize every chance for conversation, and always
turn to the subject of their own affairs--their former prosperity, the
mere temporary necessity of their being in service, and their glowing
prospects for the future. They insist on giving you their confidential
opinion of the establishment in which you are a guest, and which is
invariably far inferior to others in which they have been employed.
They comment amiably on your garments, if they are pleased with them,
or are quite as ready to convey that they are not. And woe to him who
shows resentment! He may beseech their service henceforth in vain. If,
however, he meekly accepts them as they are, they will graciously be
pleased to perform for him the duties for which they are paid fabulous
wages.
Hotel servants constitute the aristocracy among “domestics,” as
they prefer to call themselves; just as hotel dwellers--of the more
luxurious type--constitute a kind of aristocracy among third-rate
society in New York. These people lead a strange, unreal sort of
existence, living as it were in a thickly gilded, thickly padded
vacuum, whence they issue periodically into the hands of a retinue
of hangers-on: manicures, _masseurs_, hair-dressers, and for the men
a train of speculators and sporting parasites. In this world, where
there are no definite duties or responsibilities, there are naturally
no fixed hours for anything. Meals occur when the caprice of the
individual demands them--breakfast at one, or at three, if he likes;
dinner at the supper hour, or, instead of tea, a restaurant is always
at his elbow. With the same irresponsibility, engagements are broken or
kept an hour late; agreements are forfeited or forgotten altogether;
order of any sort is unknown, and the only activity of this large class
of wealthy people is a hectic, unregulated striving after pleasure.
Women especially grow into hotel fungi of this description, sitting
about the hot, over-decorated lobbies and in the huge, crowded
restaurants, with nothing to do but stare and be stared at. They are a
curious by-product of the energetic, capable American woman in general;
and one thinks there might be salvation for them in the “housekeeping”
worries they disdainfully repudiate. Still, it cannot be denied that
with the serious problem of servants and the exorbitant prices of
household commodities a home is far more difficult to maintain in
America than in the average modern country. Hospitality under the
present conditions presents features slightly careworn; and the New
York hostess is apt to be more anxious than charming, and to end her
career on the dismal verandas of a sanatorium for nervous diseases.
But society the world round has very much the same character. For types
peculiar to a country, one must descend the ladder to rungs nearer
the native soil; in New York there are the John Browns of Harlem, for
example. No one outside America has heard of Harlem. Does the loyal
Englishman abroad speak of Hammersmith? Does the Frenchman _en voyage_
descant on the beauties of the Batignolles? These abominations are
locked within the national bosom; only Hyde Park and the Champs Elysées
and Fifth Avenue are allowed out for alien gaze. Yet quite as emphatic
of New York struggle and achievement as the few score millionaire
palaces along the avenue are the tens of thousands of cramped Harlem
flats that overspread the northern end of the island from One Hundred
and Twenty-fifth Street to the Bronx. For tens of thousands of
John Browns have daily to wage war in the deadly field of American
commercial competition, in order to pay the rent and the gas bill, and
the monthly installment on the furniture of these miniature homes. They
have not, however, to pay for the electric light, or the hot-water
heating, or a dozen other comforts which are a recurring source of
amazement to the foreigner in such a place. For twenty dollars a month,
John Brown and his wife are furnished not only with three rooms and a
luxurious porcelain bath in a white-tiled bathroom; but also the use
of two lifts, the inexhaustible services of the janitor, a comfortable
roof garden in summer, and an imposing entrance hall downstairs, done
in imitation Carrara marble and imitation Cordova leather. With this
goes a still more imposing address, and Mrs. John can rouse the eternal
envy of the weary Sixth Avenue shop-girl by ordering her lemon-squeezer
or two yards of linoleum sent to “Marie Antoinette Court,” or “The
Cornwallis Arms.” The shop-girl understands that Mrs. John’s husband is
a success.
That is, that he earns in the neighborhood of a hundred dollars a
month. With this he can afford to pay the household expenses, to dress
himself and his wife a bit better than their position demands, to
subscribe to two or three of the ten-cent magazines, and to do a play
on Broadway now and then. Mrs. John of course is a matinée fiend, and
has the candy habit. These excesses must be provided for; also John’s
five-cent cigars and his occasional mild “spree with the boys.” For the
rest, they are a prudent couple; methodically religious, inordinately
moral; banking a few dollars every month against the menacing
rainy-day, and, if this has not arrived by vacation time in August,
promptly spending the money on the lurid delights of Atlantic City or
some other ocean resort. Thence they return haggard but triumphant,
with a coat of tan laboriously acquired by wetting faces and arms, and
then sitting for hours in the broiling sun--to impress the Tom Smiths
in the flat next door that they have had a “perfectly grand time.”
A naïve, hard-working, kindly couple, severely conventional in their
prejudices, impressionable as children in their affections, and with
a certain persistent cleverness that shoots beyond the limitations of
their type, and hints to them of the habits and manners of a finer.
In them the passionate motive of self-development that dominates
all American life has so far found an outlet only in demand for the
conveniences and material comforts of the further advanced whom they
imitate. When in the natural course of things they turn their eyes
towards the culture of the Man Higher Up, they will obtain that, too.
And meanwhile does not Mrs. Brown have her Tennyson Club, and John his
uniform edition of Shakespeare?
Some New Yorkers who shudder at Harlem are not as lucky. I was once
the guest of a lady who had just moved into her sumptuous new
home on Riverside Drive. My rooms, to quote the first-class hotel
circular, were replete with every luxury; I could turn on the light
from seven different places; I could make the chairs into couches or
the couches into chairs; I could talk by one of the marvellous ebony
and silver telephones to the valet or the cook, or if I pleased to
Chicago. There was nothing mortal man could invent that had not been
put in those rooms, including six varieties of reading-lamps, and a
bed-reading-table that shot out and arranged itself obligingly when one
pushed a button.
But there was nothing to read. Apologetically, I sought my hostess.
Would she allow me to pilfer the library? For a moment the lady looked
blank. Then, with a smile of relief, she said: “Of course! You want
some magazines. How stupid of the servants. I’ll have them sent to you
at once; but you know we have no library. I think books are so ugly,
don’t you?”
I am not hopelessly addicted to veracity, but I will set my hand and
seal to this story; also to the fact that in all that palace of the
superfluous there was not to my knowledge one book of any sort. Even
the favourite whipped-cream novel of society was wanting; but magazines
of every kind and description littered the place. The reason for this
apparently inexplicable state of affairs is simple; time is money;
therefore not to be expended without calculation. In the magazine the
rushed business man, and the equally rushed business or society woman,
has a literary quick-lunch that can be swallowed in convenient bites
at odd moments during the day.
Is the business man dining out? He looks at the reviews of books he has
not read on the way to his office in the morning; criticisms of plays
he has not seen, on the way back at night. Half an hour of magazine
is made thus to yield some eight hours of theatre and twenty-four of
reading books--and his _vis-à-vis_ at dinner records at next day’s tea
party, “what a well-informed man that Mr. Worriton is! He seems to find
time for everything.”
Is the society woman “looking in” at an important reception? Between a
fitting at her dressmaker’s, luncheon, bridge and two teas, she catches
up the last Review from the pocket of her limousine, and runs over the
political notes, war news, foreign events of the week. Result: “that
Mrs. Newrich is really a remarkable woman!” declares the distinguished
guest of the reception to his hostess. “Such a breadth of interest,
such an intelligent outlook! It is genuine pleasure to meet a woman who
shows some acquaintance with the affairs of the day.”
And so again they hoodwink one another, each practicing the same
deceptive game of superficial show; yet none suspecting any of the
rest. And the magazine syndicates flourish and multiply. In this piece
that is in preparation, the actors are too busy proving themselves
capable of their parts really to take time to become so. To succeed
with them, you must offer your dose in tabloids: highly concentrated
essence of whatever it is, and always sugar-coated. Then they will
swallow it promptly, and demand more. Remember, too, that what they
want in the way of “culture” is not drama, or literature, or music;
but excitement--of admiration, pity, the erotic or the sternly moral
sense. Their nerves must be kept at a certain perpetual tension. He who
overlooks this supreme fact, in creating for them, fails.
There are in America today some thousands of men and women who have
taken the one step further than their fellows in that they realize
this, and so are able shrewdly to pander to the national appetites. The
result is a continuous outpouring of novels and short stories, plays
and hybrid songs, such as in a less vast and less extravagant country
would ruin one another by their very multitude; but which in the United
States meet with an appalling success. Appalling, because it is not a
primitive, but a too exotic, fancy that delights in them. For his mind
as for his body, the American demands an overheated dwelling; when
not plunged within the hectic details of a “best-seller,” by way of
recreation, he is apt to be immersed in the florid joys of a Broadway
extravaganza.
These unique American productions, made up of large beauty choruses,
magnificent scenery, gorgeous costumes, elaborate fantasies of ballet
and song, bear the same relation to actual drama that the best-sellers
bear to literature, and are as popular. The Hippodrome, with its huge
stage accommodating four hundred people, and its enormous central tank
for water spectacles, is easily first among the extravaganza houses
of New York. Twice a day an eager audience, drawn from all classes
of metropolitan and transient society, crowds the great amphitheatre
to the doors. The performance prepared for them is on the order of
a French révue: a combination circus and vaudeville, held together
by a thin thread of plot that permits the white-flannelled youth
and bejewelled maiden, who have faithfully exclaimed over each new
sensation of the piece, finally to embrace one another, with the novel
cry of “at last!”
Meanwhile kangaroos engage in a boxing match, hippopotami splash most
of the reservoir over the “South Sea Girls”; the Monte Carlo Casino
presents its hoary tables as background for the “Dance of the Jeunesse
Dorée,” and Maoris from New Zealand give an imitation of an army of
tarantulas writhing from one side of the stage to another. The climax
is a stupendous _tableau en pyramide_ of fountains, marble staircases,
gilded thrones, and opalescent canopies; built up, banked, and held
together by girls of every costume and complexion. Nothing succeeds
in New York without girls; the more there are, the more triumphant
the success. So the Hippodrome, being in every way triumphant, has
mountains of them: tall girls and little girls, Spanish girls, Japanese
girls, Hindoo girls and French girls; and at the very top of the peak,
where the “spot” points its dazzling ray, the American girl, wrapped
in the Stars and Stripes of her apotheosis. _Ecco!_ The last word has
been said; applause thunders to the rafters; the flag is unfurled, to
show the maiden in the victorious garb of a Captain of the Volunteers;
and the curtain falls amid the lusty strains of the national anthem.
Everybody goes home happy, and the box office nets five thousand
dollars. They know the value of patriotism, these good Hebrews.
This sentiment, always near the surface with Americans, grows deeper
and more fervid as it localizes; leading to a curiously intense
snobbism on the part of one section of the country towards another.
Thus New York society sniffs at Westerners; let them approach the
citadel ever so heavily armed with gold mines, they have a long siege
before it surrenders to them. On the other hand, the same society
smiles eagerly upon Southerners of no pocket-books at all; and feeds
and fêtes and fawns upon them, because they are doomed, the minute
their Southern accent is heard, to come of “a good old family.” The
idea of a decayed aristocracy in two-hundred-year-old America is not
without comedy, but in the States Southerners are taken very solemnly,
by themselves as by everyone else.
My friend of the æsthetic antipathy to books (really a delightful
person) is a Southerner--or was, before gathered into the fold of the
New York Four Hundred. She apologized for taking me to the Horse Show
(which she thought might amuse me, however), because “no one goes any
more. It’s all Middle West and commuters.” For the benefit of those
imperfect in social geography I must explain that Middle West is the
one thing worse than West, and that commuters are those unfortunates
without the sacred pale, who are forced to journey to and from
Manhattan by ferries or underground tubes. They are the butt of comic
newspaper supplements, topical songs, and society witticisms; also the
despised and over-charged “out-of-town customers” of the haughty Fifth
Avenue importer.
For the latter (a phenomenon unique to New York) has her own system of
snobbism, quite as elaborate as that of her proudest client. They are
really a remarkable mixture of superciliousness and abject servility,
these Irish and Hebrew “Madame Celestes,” whose thriving establishments
form so conspicuous a part of the important avenue. As exponents of the
vagaries of American democracy, they deserve a paragraph to themselves.
Each has her rococo shop, and her retinue of mannequin assistants
garbed in the extreme of fashion; each makes her yearly or bi-yearly
trip to Paris, from which she returns with strange and bizarre
creations, which she assures her patrons are the “only thing” being
worn by _Parisiennes_ this season. Now even the untutored male knows
that there is never an “only thing” favoured by the capricious and
original _Parisienne_; but that she changes with every wind, and in all
seasons wears everything under the sun (including ankle-bracelets and
Cubist hats), provided it has the one hall-mark: _chic_.
But Madame New York meekly accepts the Irish lady’s dictum, and arrays
herself accordingly--with what result of extravagant monotony we shall
see later on. Enough for the present that she is absolutely submissive
to the vulgar taste and iron decrees of the rubicund “Celeste” from
Cork, and that the latter alternately condescends and grovels to her,
in a manner amazing to the foreigner, who may be looking on. Yet
on second thoughts it is quite explicable: after the habit of all
Americans, native or naturalized, “Celeste” cannot conceal that she
considers herself “as good as” anyone, if not a shade better than
some. At the same time, again truly American, she worships the dollars
madame represents (and whose aggregate she can quote to a decimal), and
respects the lady in proportion. Hence her bewildering combinations of
“certainly, Madame--it shall be exactly as Madame orders,” with “Oh,
_my dear_, I wouldn’t have that! Why, girlie, that on you with your
dark skin would look like sky-blue on an Indian! But, see, dear, here’s
a pretty pink model”--etc., etc.
And so it continues, unctuous deference sandwiched between endearments
and snubs throughout the entire conference of shopkeeper and customer;
and the latter takes it all as a matter of course, though, if her own
husband should venture to disagree with her on any point of judgment,
she would be furious with him for a week. When I commented to one
lady on these familiar blandishments and criticisms of shop people in
New York, she said indulgently: “Oh, they all do it. They don’t mean
anything; it’s only their way.”
Yet I have heard that same lady hotly protest against the wife of
a Colorado silver magnate (whom she had known for years) daring to
address her by her Christian name. “That vulgar Westerner!” she
exclaimed; “the next thing she’ll be calling me dear!”
Democracy remains democracy as long as it cannot possibly encroach upon
the social sphere; the moment the boundary is passed, however, and the
successful “climber” threatens equal footing with the _grande dame_ on
the other side, herself still climbing in England or Europe, anathema!
The fact is, that Americans, like all other very young people, seek to
hide their lack of assurance--social and otherwise--by an aggressive
policy of defense which they call independence; but which is verily
snobbism of the most virulent brand. From the John Browns to the
multimillionaires with daughters who are duchesses, they are intent on
emphasizing their own position and its privileges; unconscious that if
they themselves were sure of it so would be everyone else.
But inevitably the actors must stumble and stammer, and insert false
lines, before finally they shall “feel” their parts, and forge ahead to
the victory of finished performance.
III
OFF DUTY
When one ponders what the New Yorker in his leisure hours most enjoys,
one answers without hesitation: feeding. The word is not elegant,
but neither is the act, as one sees it in process at the mammoth
restaurants. Far heavier and more prolonged than mere eating and
drinking is this serious cult of food on the part of the average
Manhattanite. It has even led to the forming of a distinct “set,”
christened by some satirical outsider: “Lobster Society.”
Here are met the moneyed plutocrat and his exuberant “lady friend,”
the mauve-waistcoated sporting man, the society _déclassée_ with her
gorgeous jewels and little air of tragedy, the expansive Hebrew and his
chorus girl, the gauche out-of-town couple with their beaming smiles
and last season’s clothes: all that hazy limbo that hovers on the
social boundary-line, but hovers futilely--and that seeks to smother
its disappointment with elaborate feasts of over-rich food.
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
“NEW YORK’S FINEST”: THE FAMOUS MOUNTED POLICE SQUAD]
It is amazing the thousands of these people that there are--New York
seems to breed them faster than any other type; and the hundreds of
restaurants they support. Every hotel has its three or four huge
dining-rooms, its Palm Garden, Dutch Grill, etc.; but, as all these
were not enough, shrewd Frenchmen and Germans and Viennese have dotted
the city with _cafés_ and _brauhausen_ and _Little Hungaries_, to say
nothing of the alarming Egyptian and Turkish abortions that are the
favourite erection of the American restaurateur himself.
The typical New York feeding-place from the outside is a palace in
terra cotta; from the inside, a vast galleried room or set of rooms,
upheld by rose or ochre marble pillars, carpeted with thick red rugs,
furnished with bright gilt chairs and heavily damasked, flower-laden
tables--the whole interspersed and overtopped and surrounded by a
jumble of fountains, gilt-and-onyx Sphinxes, caryatids, centaurs,
bacchantes, and heaven knows what else of the superfluous and
disassociated. To reach one’s table, one must thread one’s way through
a maze of lions couchant, peacocks with spread mother o’ pearl tails,
and opalescent dragons that turn out to be lights: proud detail of the
“million dollar decorative scheme” referred to in the advertisements
of the house. Finally anchored in this sea of sumptuousness, one is
confronted with the dire necessity of ordering a meal from a menu that
would have staggered Epicurus.
There is the table d’hôte of nine courses--any one of them a meal
in itself; or there is the bewildering _carte du jour_, from which
to choose strawberries in December, oranges in May, or whatever
collection of ruinous exotics one pleases. The New Yorker himself goes
methodically down the list, from oysters to iced pudding; impartial
in his recognition of the merits of lobster bisque, _sole au gratin_,
creamed sweetbreads, porterhouse steak, broiled partridge and Russian
salad. He sits down to this orgy about seven o’clock, and rises--or
is assisted to rise--about ten or half past, unless he is going on to
a play, in which case he disposes of his nine courses with the same
lightning execution displayed at his quick-lunch, only increasing his
drink supply to facilitate the process.
Meanwhile there is the “Neapolitan Quartet,” and the Hungarian
Rhapsodist, and the lady in the pink satin blouse who sings “The
Rosary,” to amuse our up-to-date Nero. I wonder what the Romans
would make of the modern cabaret? Like so many French importations,
stripped in transit of their saving coat of French _esprit_, the
cabaret in American becomes helplessly vulgar. Extreme youth cannot
carry off the risqué, which requires the salt of worldly wisdom; it
only succeeds in being rowdy. And the noisy songs, the loud jokes, the
blatant dances--all the spurious clap-trap which in these New York
feeding-resorts passes for amusement--point to the most youthful sort
of rowdyism: to a popular discrimination still in embryo. But the
New Yorker dotes on it--the cabaret, I mean; if for no other reason,
because it satisfies his passion for getting his money’s worth. He is
ready to pay a handsome price, but he demands handsome return, and no
“extras” if you please.
When the ten-cent charge for bread and butter was inaugurated by
New York restaurateurs last Spring, their patrons were furious; it
hinted of the parsimonious European charge for “cover.” But if the
short-sighted proprietors had quietly added five cents to the price of
each article on the menu, it would have passed unnoticed: it is not
paying that the American minds, it is “being done.” Conceal from him
this humiliating consciousness, and he will empty his pockets. Thus, at
the theatre, seats are considerably higher than in European cities, but
they are also far more comfortable; and include a program, sufficient
room for one’s hat and wrap, the free services of the usher, and as
many glasses of the beloved ice-water as one cares to call for. People
would not tolerate being disturbed throughout the performance by the
incessant demands for a “_petite service_” and other supplements that
persecute the Continental theatre-goer; while as for being forced to
leave one’s wraps in a _garde-robe_, and to pay for the privilege of
fighting to recover them, the independent American would snort at the
bare idea. He insists on a maximum amount of comfort for his money, and
on paying for it in a lump sum, either at the beginning or at the end.
Convenience, the almighty god, acknowledges no limits to its sway.
It was convenience that until recently made it the custom for the
average New York play-goer to appear at the theatre in morning dress.
The tired business man could afford to go to the play, but had not the
energy to change for it; so, naturally, his wife and daughter did not
change either, and the orchestra presented a commonplace aspect, made
up of shirtwaists and high-buttoned coats. Now, however, following
the example of society, people are beginning to break away from this
unattractive austerity; and theatre audiences are enlivened by a
sprinkling of light frocks and white shirts.
We have already commented on the most popular type of dramatic
amusement in America: the extravaganza, and musical comedy so-called;
it is time now to mention the gradually developing legitimate drama,
which has its able exponents in Augustus Thomas, Edward Sheldon,
Eugene Walter, the late Clyde Fitch, and half a dozen others of no
less insight and ability. Their plays present the stirring and highly
dramatic scenes of American business and social life (using social in
its original sense); and while for the foreigner many of the situations
lose their full significance--being peculiar to America, in rather
greater degree than French plays are peculiar to France, and English to
England--even he must be impressed with the vivid realism and powerful
climax of the best American comedies.
The nation as a whole is vehemently opposed to tragedy in any form,
and demands of books and plays alike that they invariably shall end
well. Such brilliant exceptions as Eugene Walter’s “The Easiest Way”
and Sheldon’s “The Nigger,” only prove the rule that the successful
piece must have a “happy ending.” High finance plays naturally an
important part as nucleus of plots; also the marriage of working girls
with scions of the Upper Ten. But the playwright has only to look into
the newspapers, in this country of perpetual adventure, to find enough
romance and sensation to fill every theatre in New York.
It seems almost as though the people themselves are surfeited with the
actual drama that surrounds them, for they are rather languid as an
audience, and must be piqued by more and more startling “thrillers”
before moved to enthusiasm. Even then their applause is usually
directed towards the “star,” in whom they take far keener interest
than in the play itself. It is interesting to follow this passionate
individualism of the nation that dominates its amusements as well as
its activities. The player, not the play’s the thing with Americans;
and on theatrical bills the name of the principal actor or actress is
always given the largest type, the title of the piece next largest;
while the author is tucked away like an afterthought in letters that
can just be seen.
The acute American business man, who is always a business man, whether
financing a railroad or a Broadway farce, is not slow to profit by
the _penchant_ of the public for “big” names. By means of unlimited
advertising and the right kind of notoriety, he builds up ordinary
actors into valuable theatrical properties. Given a comedian of average
talent, average good looks, and an average amount of magnetism, _and_
a clever press agent: he has a star! This brilliant being draws five
times the salary of the leading lady of former years (a woman star is
obviously a shade or two more radiant than a man), and in return has
only to confide her life history and beauty recipés to her adoring
public, via the current magazines. Furthermore stars are received
with open arms by Society (which leading ladies were not), and may be
divorced oftener than other people without injury--rather with distinct
advantage--to their reputation. Each new divorce gives a fillip to the
public curiosity, and so brings in money to the box office.
Not only in the field of the “legitimate” is a big name the
all-important asset of an artist. Ladies who have figured in murder
trials, gentlemen whom circumstantial evidence alone has failed to
prove assassins, are eagerly sought after by enterprising vaudeville
managers, who beg them to accept the paltry sum of a thousand dollars
a week, for showing themselves to curious crowds, and delivering a
ten-minute monologue on the deficiencies of American law! How or why
the name has become “big” is a matter of only financial moment; and
Americans of rigid respectability flock to stare at ex-criminals,
members of the under-world temporarily in the limelight, and young
persons whose sole claim to distinction lies in the glamour shed by
one-time royal favour. Thanks to press agents and newspapers, the
affairs of this motley collection--as indeed of “stars” of every
lustre--are so constantly and so intimately before the public, that one
hears people of all classes discussing them as though they were their
lifelong friends.
Thus at the theatre: “Oh, no, the play isn’t anything, but I come to
see Laura Lee. Isn’t she stunning? You ought to see her in blue--she
says herself blue’s her colour. I don’t think much of these dresses
she’s wearing tonight; she got them at Héloïse’s. Now generally she
gets her things at Robert’s--she says Robert just suits her _genre_.”
Again, at the restaurant: “How seedy May Morris is looking--there she
is, over by the window. You know she divorced her first husband because
he made her pay the rent, and now she’s leading a cat-and-dog life with
this one because he’s jealous of the manager. That’s Mrs. Willy Spry
who just spoke to her; well, I didn’t know she knew _her_!”
What they do not know about celebrities of all sorts would be hard to
teach Americans, particularly the women. They can tell you how many
eggs Caruso eats for breakfast, and describe to the last rosebush
Maude Adams’ country home; their interest in the drama and music
these people interpret trails along tepidly, in wake of their worship
for the successful individual. Americans are not a musical people.
They go to opera because it is fashionable to be seen there, and to
concerts and recitals for the most part because they confer the proper
æsthetic touch. But only a handful have any real knowledge or love of
music, and that handful is continually crucified by the indifference
of the rest. I can think of no more painful experience for a sincere
music-lover than to attend a performance at the Metropolitan Opera;
and this not only because people are continually coming in and going
out, destroying the continuity of the piece, but because the latter
itself is carelessly executed and often faulty. Here again the quartet
of exorbitantly paid stars are charged with the success of the entire
performance; the conductor is an insignificant quantity, and the chorus
goes its lackadaisical way unheeded--even smiling and exchanging
remarks in the background, with no one the wiser. From a box near the
stage I once saw two priests in “_Aïda_” jocosely tweak one another’s
beards just at the moment of the majestic _finale_. Why not? The
audience, if it pays attention to the opera at all, pays it to Caruso
and Destinn and Homer--to the big name and the big voice; not to petty
detail such as chorus and _mise-en-scène_.
But of course opera is the last thing for which people buy ten-dollar
seats at the Metropolitan. The “Golden Horse-Shoe” is the spectacle
they pay to see; the masterpieces of _Céleste_ and _Héloïse_ (as
exhibited by Madame Millions and her intimates) rather than the
masterpieces of Wagner or Puccini lure them within the great
amphitheatre. And certain it is that the famous double tier of boxes
boasts more beautiful women, gorgeously arrayed, than any other place
of assembly in America. Yet as I first saw them, from my modest seat
in the orchestra, they appeared to be a collection of radiant Venuses
sitting in gilded bathtubs: above the high box-rail, only rows of
gleaming shoulders, marvellously dressed heads, and winking jewels were
visible. Later, in the foyer, I discovered that some of them at least
were more modernly attired than the lady who rose from the sea, but the
first impression has always remained the more vivid.
Society--ever deliciously naïve in airing its ignorance--is heard to
express some quaint criticisms at opera. At a performance of _Tristan_,
I sat next a débutante who had the reputation of being “musical.” In
the midst of the glorious second act, she whispered plaintively, “I do
hate it when our night falls on _Tristan_--it’s such a _sad_ story!”
It will be interesting to follow New York musical education, if the
indefatigable Mr. Hammerstein succeeds in his present proposal to offer
the lighter French and Italian operas at popular prices. Hitherto music
along with every other art in America has been so commercialized that
wealth rather than appreciation and true fondness has controlled it.
But meanwhile there has developed, instinctively and irrepressibly,
the much disparaged ragtime. It is the pose among musical _précieux_
loudly to decry any suggestion of ragtime as a national art; yet the
fact remains that it has grown up spontaneously as the popular and the
only distinctly American form of musical expression. Of course, the
old shuffling clog-dances of the negroes were responsible for it in
the beginning. I was visiting some Americans in Tokio when a portfolio
of the “new music” was sent out to them (1899), and I remember that it
consisted entirely of cakewalks and “coon songs,” with negro titles
and pictures of negroes dancing, on the cover. But this has long since
ceased to be characteristic of ragtime as a whole, which takes its
inspiration from every phase of nervous, precipitate American life.
In the jerky, syncopated measures, one can almost hear between
beats the familiar rush of feet, hurrying along--stumbling--halting
abruptly--only to fly ahead faster. Ragtime is the pell-mell,
helter-skelter, headlong spirit of America expressed in tune; and no
other people, however charmed by its peculiar fascination and wild
swing, can play or dance to it like Americans. It is instinctive with
them; where classical music, so called, is a laboriously acquired taste.
New Yorkers in particular take their artistic hobbies very seriously;
not only music and the conventional arts, but all those occult and
mystic off-shoots that abound wherever there are idle people. To
assuage the ennui that dogs excessive wealth, they devote themselves
to all sorts of cults and intricate beliefs. Swamis, crystal-gazers,
astrologers, mind-readers, and Messiahs of every kind and colour reap
a luxurious harvest in New York. Women especially have a new creed for
every month in the year; and discuss “the aura,” and “the submerged
self,” and the “spiritual significance of colour,” with profound
solemnity. On being presented to a lady, you are apt to be asked
your birth date, the number of letters in your Christian name, your
favourite hue, and other momentous questions that must be cleared away
before acquaintance can proceed, or even begin at all.
“John?” cries the lady. “I knew you were a John, the minute I saw you!
Now, what do you think I am?”
You are sure to say a “Mabel” where she is an “Edith,” or a Gladys
where she is a Helen, or to commit some other blunder which takes the
better part of an hour to be explained to you. Week-end parties are
perfect hot-beds of occultism, each guest striving to out-argue every
other in the race to gain proselytes for his religion of the moment.
The American house-party on the whole is a much more serious affair
than its original English model. The anxious American hostess never
quite gains that casual, easy manner of putting her house at the
disposal of her guests, and then forgetting it and them. She must be
always “entertaining,” than which there is no more dreary persecution
for the long-suffering visitor. Except for this, her hospitality is
delightful; and it is a joy to leave the dust and roar of New York, and
motor out to one of the many charming country houses on Long Island or
up the Hudson for a peaceful week-end. Americans show great good sense
in clinging to their native Colonial architecture, which lends itself
admirably to the simple, well-kept lawns and old-fashioned gardens.
In comparison with country estates of the old world, one misses the
dignity of ancient stone and trees; but gains the airy openness and
many luxuries of modern comfort.
As for country life in general, it is further advanced than on the
Continent, but not so far advanced as in England. Americans, being a
young people, are naturally an informal people, however they may rig
themselves out when they are on show. They love informal clothes, and
customs, and the happy-go-lucky freedom of out-of-doors. On the other
hand, they are not a sporting people, except by individuals. They are
athletes rather than sportsmen; the passion for individual prowess
being very strong, the devotion to sport for sport’s sake much less in
evidence. The spirit of competition is as keen in the athletic field
as it is in Wall Street; and at the intercollegiate games enthusiasm
is always centred on the particular hero of each side, rather than on
the play of the team as a whole. The American in general distinguishes
himself in the “individual” rather than the team sports--in running,
swimming, skating, and tennis; all of which display to fine advantage
his wiry, lean agility.
At the same time, there is nothing more typically American or more
inspiring to watch than one of the great collegiate team games, when
thirty thousand spectators are massed round the field, breathlessly
intent on every detail. Even in an immense city like New York, on the
day of a big game, one feels a peculiar excitement in the air. The
hotels are full of eager boys with sweaters, through the streets dash
gaily decorated motors, and the stations are crowded with fathers,
mothers, sisters and sweethearts on their way to cheer their particular
hopeful. For once, too, the harassed man of affairs throws business to
the four winds, remembers only that he is an “old grad” of Harvard or
Princeton or Yale, and hurries off to cheer for his Alma Mater.
Then at the field there are the two vast semicircles of challenging
colours, the advance “rooting”--the songs, yells, ringing of bells and
tooting of horns--that grows to positive frenzy as the two contesting
teams come in and take their places. And, as the game proceeds,
the still more fervent shouts--middle-aged men standing up on their
seats and bawling three-times-threes, young girls laughing, crying,
splitting their gloves in madness of applause, small boys screeching
encouragement to “our side,” withering taunts to the opponents; and
then all at once a deathly hush--in such a huge congregation twice as
impressive as all their noise--while a goal is made or a home base run.
And the enthusiasm breaks forth more furious than ever.
We are a long way now from the stodgy, dull-eyed diner-out, in his
murky lair; now, we are looking on at youth at its best--its most eager
and unconscious; in which guise Americans in their vivid charm are
irresistible.
IV
MISS NEW YORK, JR.
There is no woman in modern times of whom so much has been written,
so little said, as of the American woman. Essayists have echoed one
another in pronouncing her the handsomest, the best dressed, the most
virtuous, and altogether the most attractive woman the world round.
Psychologists have let her carefully alone; she is not a simple problem
to expound. She is, however, a most interesting one, and I have not the
courage to slight her with the usual cursory remarks on eyes, hair, and
figure. She deserves a second and more searching glance.
To her own countrymen she is a goddess on a pedestal that never
totters; to the foreigner she is a pretty, restless, thoroughly selfish
female, who roams the earth at scandalous liberty, while her husband
sits at home and posts checks. Naturally, the truth--if one can get
at truth regarding such a complex creature--falls between these two
conceptions: the American woman is a splendid, faulty human being, in
whom the extremes of human weakness and nobility seem surely to have
met. She is the product of the extreme Western philosophy of absolute
individualism, and as such is constituted a law unto herself, which
she defies the world to gainsay. At the same time she knows herself
so little that she changes and contradicts this law constantly, thus
bewildering those who are trying to understand it and her.
For example, we are convinced of her independence. We go with her to
the milliner’s. She wants a hat with plumes. “Oh, but, _my dear_,”
says the saleslady reprovingly, “they aren’t wearing plumes this
season--they aren’t wearing them _at all_. Everybody is having Paradise
feathers.” Madame New York instantly declares that in that case she
must have Paradise feathers, too, and is thoroughly content when the
same are added to the nine hundred and ninety-nine other feathers that
flutter out the avenue next afternoon. Plumes may be far more becoming
to her; in her heart she may secretly regret them; but she must have
what everyone else has. _She has not the independence to break away
from the herd._
And so it is with all her costume, her coiffure, the very bag on her
wrist and brooch at her throat: every detail must be that detail of
the _type_. She neither dares nor knows how to be different. But,
within the stronghold of the type, she dares anything. Are “they”
wearing narrow skirts? Every New York woman challenges every other,
with her frock three inches tighter than the last lady’s. Are they
slashing skirts to the ankle in Paris? Madame New York slashes hers to
the shoe-tops, always provided she has the concurrence of “those” of
Manhattan. Once secured by the sanction of the mass, her instinct for
exaggeration is unleashed; her perverse imagination shakes off its
chronic torpor, and soars to flights of fearful and wonderful audacity.
Even then, however, she originates no fantasy of her own, but simply
elaborates and enlarges upon the primary copy. Her impulse is not to
think and create, but to observe and assimilate. It would never occur
to her to study the lines of her head and arrange her hair accordingly;
rather she studies the head of her next-door neighbour, and promptly
duplicates it--generally with distinct improvement over the original.
True to her race, she has a genius for imitation that will not be
subdued. But she is not an artist.
For this reason, the American woman bores us with her vanity, where
the Englishwoman rouses our tenderness, and the Frenchwoman piques and
allures. There is an appealing clumsiness in the way the Englishwoman
goes about adding her little touches of feminine adornment; the badly
tied bow, the awkward bit of lace, making their deprecating bid for
favour. The Frenchwoman, with her seductive devices of alternate
concealment and daring displays, lays constant emphasis on the two
outstanding charms of all femininity: mystery and change. But when we
come to the American woman we are confronted with that most depressing
of personalities, the stereotyped. She has made of herself a mannequin
for the exposition of expensive clothes, costly jewels, and a mass of
futile accessories that neither in themselves nor as pointers to an
individuality signify anything whatsoever. This figure of set elegance
she has overlaid with a determined animation that is never allowed to
flag, but keeps the puppet in an incessant state of laughing, smiling,
chattering--motion of one sort or another--till we long for the
machinery to run down, and the show to be ended.
But this never occurs, except when the entire elaborate mechanism falls
to pieces with a crash; and the woman becomes that wretched, sexless
thing--a nervous wreck. Till then, to use her own favourite expression,
“she will go till she drops,” and the onlooker is forced to watch her
in the unattractive process.
Of course the motive of this excessive activity on the part of American
men and women alike is the passionate wish to appear young. As in
the extreme East age is worshipped, here in the extreme West youth
constitutes a religion, of which young women are the high priestesses.
Far from moving steadily on to a climax in ripe maturity, life for the
American girl reaches its dazzling apex when she is eighteen or twenty;
this, she is constantly told by parents, teachers and friends, is the
golden period of her existence. She is urged to make the most of every
precious minute; and everything and everybody must be sacrificed in
helping her to do it.
As a matter of course, she is given the most comfortable room in the
house, the prettiest clothes, the best seat at the theatre. As a matter
of course, she accepts them. Why should it occur to her to defer to
age, when age anxiously and at every turn defers to her? Oneself as
the pivot of existence is far more interesting than any other creature;
and it is all so brief. Soon will come marriage, with its tiresome
responsibilities, its liberty curtailed, and children, the forerunners
of awful middle age. Laugh, dance, and amuse yourself today is the
eternal warning in the ears of the American girl; for tomorrow you
will be on the shelf, and another generation will have come into your
kingdom.
The young lady is not slow to hear the call--or to follow it. With
feverish haste, she seizes her prerogative of queen of the moment, and
demands the satisfaction of her every caprice. Her tastes and desires
regulate the diversion and education of the community. What she favours
succeeds; what she frowns on fails. A famous American actress told me
that she traced her fortune to her popularity with young girls. “I
never snub them,” she said; “when they write me silly letters, I answer
them. I guard my reputation to the point of prudishness, so that I may
meet them socially, and invite them to my home. They are the talisman
of my career. It matters little what I play--if the young girls like
me, I have a success.”
The wise theatrical manager, however, is differently minded. He, too,
has his harvests to reap from the approval of Miss New York, Jr.,
and arranges his program accordingly. Thus the American play-goer is
treated to a series of musical comedies, full of smart slang scrappily
composed round a hybrid waltz; so-called “society plays,” stocked with
sumptuous clothes, many servants, and shallow dialogue; unrecognizable
“adapted” pieces, expurgated not only of the _risqué_, but of all
wit and local atmosphere as well; and finally the magnificently
vacuous extravaganza: this syrup and mush is regularly served to the
theatre-going public, and labelled “drama”! Yet thousands of grown
men and women meekly swallow it--even come to prefer it--because
_Mademoiselle Miss_ so decrees.
She also is originally responsible for the multitude of “society
novels,” vapid short stories, and profusely illustrated gift books,
which make up the literature of modern America. On her altar is the
vulgar “Girl Calendar,” the still more vulgar poster; flaunting
her self-conscious prettiness from every shop window, every subway
and elevated book-stall. She is displayed to us with dogs, with
cats, in the country, in town, getting into motors, getting out of
boats, driving a four-in-hand, or again a vacuum cleaner--for she
is indispensable to the advertising agent. Her fixed good looks and
studied poses have invaded the Continent; and even in Spain, in
the sleepy old town of Toledo, among the grave prints of Velasquez
and Ribera, I came across the familiar pert silhouette with its
worshipping-male counterpart, and read the familiar title: “At the
Opera.”
From all this superficial self-importance, whether of her own or her
elders’ making, one might easily write the American girl down as a
vain, empty-headed nonentity, not worth thoughtful consideration. On
the contrary, she decidedly is worth it. Behind her arrogance and
foolish affectations is a mind alert to stimulus, a heart generous and
warm to respond, a spirit brave and resourceful. It takes adversity to
prove the true quality of this girl, for then her arrogance becomes
high determination; her absurdities fall from her, like the cheap cloak
they are, and she takes her natural place in the world as a courageous,
clear-sighted woman.
I believe that among the working girls is to be found the finest and
most distinct type of American woman. This sounds a sweeping statement,
and one difficult to substantiate; but let us examine it. Whence
are the working girls of New York recruited? From the families of
immigrants, you guess at once. Only a very small fraction. The great
majority come from American homes, in the North, South, or Middle West,
where the fathers have failed in business, or died, or in some other
way left the daughters to provide for themselves.
The first impulse, on the part of the latter, is to go to New York. If
you are going to hang yourself, choose a big tree, says the Talmud;
and Americans have written it into their copy-books forever. Whether
they are to succeed or fail, they wish to do it in the biggest place,
on the biggest scale they can achieve. The girl who has to earn her
living, therefore, establishes herself in New York. And then begins
the struggle that is the same for women the world over, but which the
American girl meets with a sturdiness and obstinate ambition all her
own.
She may have been the pampered darling of a mansion with ten servants;
stoutly now she takes up her abode in a “third floor back,” and becomes
her own laundress. For it is part of all the contradictions of which
she is the unit that, while the most recklessly extravagant, she is
also, when occasion demands, the most practical and saving of women.
Her scant six or seven dollars a week are carefully portioned out to
yield the utmost value on every penny. She walks to and from her work,
thus saving ten cents and doing benefit to her complexion at the same
time in the tingling New York air. In the shop or office she is quiet,
competent, marvellously quick to seize and assimilate the details of a
business which two months ago she had never heard of. Without apparent
effort, she soon makes herself invaluable, and then comes the thrilling
event of her first “raise.”
I am talking always of the American girl of good parentage and
refinement, _who is the average New York business girl_; not of the
gum-chewing, haughty misses of stupendous pompadour and impertinence,
who condescend to wait on one in the cheaper shops. The average girl is
sinned against rather than sinning, in the matter of impudence. Often
of remarkable prettiness, and always of neat and attractive appearance,
she has not only the usual masculine advances to contend with, but
also the liberties of that inter-sex freedom peculiar to America. The
Englishman or the European never outgrows his first rude sense of shock
at the promiscuous contact between men and women, not only allowed, but
taken as a matter of course in the new country. To see an employé,
passing through a shop, touch a girl’s hand or pat her on the shoulder,
while delivering some message or order, scandalizes the foreigner only
less than the girl’s nonchalant acceptance of the familiarity.
But among these people there is none of the sex consciousness that
pervades older civilizations. Boys and girls, instead of being strictly
segregated from childhood, are brought up together in frank intimacy.
Whether the result is more or less desirable, in the young man and
young woman, the fact remains that the latter are quite without that
sex sensitiveness which would make their mutual attitude impossible in
any other country. If the girl in the shop resents the touch of the
young employé, it is not because it is a man’s touch, but because it is
(as she considers) the touch of an inferior. I know this to be true,
from having watched young people in all classes of American society,
and having observed the unvarying indifference with which these
caresses are bestowed and received. Indeed it is slanderous to call
them caresses; rather are they the playful motions of a lot of young
puppies or kittens.
The American girl therefore is committing no breach of dignity when
she allows herself to be touched by men who are her equals. But I have
noticed time and again that the moment those trifling attentions take
on the merest hint of the serious, she is on guard--and formidable.
Having been trained all her life to take care of herself (and in this
she is truly and admirably independent), without fuss or unnecessary
words she proceeds to put her knowledge to practical demonstration.
The following conversation, heard in an upper Avenue shop, is typical:
“Morning, Miss Dale. Say, but you’re looking some swell today--that
waist’s a peach! (The young floor-walker lays an insinuating hand on
Miss Dale’s sleeve.) How’d you like to take in a show tonight?”
“Thank you, I’m busy tonight.”
“Well, then, tomorrow?”
“I’m busy tomorrow night, too.”
“Oh, all right, make it Friday--any night you say.”
Miss Dale leaves the gloves she has been sorting, to face the
floor-walker squarely across the counter. “Look here, Mr. Barnes; since
you can’t take a hint, I’ll give it you straight from the shoulder:
you’re not my kind, and I’m not yours. And the sooner that’s understood
between us, the better for both. Good morning.”
Here is none of the hesitating reserve of the English or French woman
under the same circumstances, but a frank, downright declaration of
fact; infinitely more convincing than the usual stumbling feminine
excuses. It may be added that, while the American girl in a shop is
generally a fine type of creature, the American man in a shop is
generally inferior. Otherwise he would “get out and hustle for a bigger
job.” His feminine colleagues realize this, and are apt to despise him
in consequence. Certainly there is little of any over-intimacy between
shop men and girls; and the demoralizing English system of “living-in”
does not exist.
But there is a deeper reason for the general morality of the American
working girl: her high opinion of herself. This passion (for it is
really that), which in the girl of idle wealth shows itself in cold
selfishness and meaningless adornment, in her self-dependent sister
reaches the point of an ideal. When the American girl goes into
business, it is not as a makeshift until she shall marry, or until
something else turns up; it is because she has confidence in herself
to make her own life, and to make it a success. The faint heart and
self-mistrust which work the undoing of girls of this class in other
nations have no place in the character of Miss America. Resolutely
she fixes her goal, and nothing can stop her till she has attained
it. Failure, disappointment, rebuff only seem to steel her purpose
stronger; and, if the worst comes to worst, nine times out of ten she
will die rather than acknowledge herself beaten by surrendering to a
man.
But she dies hard, and has generally compassed her purpose long since.
It may be confined to rising from “notions” to “imported models” in
a single shop; or it may be running the gamut from office girl to
head manager of an important business. No matter how ambitious her
aspiration, or the seeming impossibility of it, the American girl is
very apt to get what she wants in the end. She has the three great
assets for success: pluck, self-confidence, and keen wits; and they
carry her often far beyond her most daring dreams of attainment.
My friend, Cynthia Brand, is an example. She came to New York when she
was twenty-two, with thirty dollars and an Idea. The idea was to design
clothes for young girls between the ages of twelve and twenty; clothes
that should be at once simple and distinguished, and many miles removed
from the rigid commonplaceness of the “Misses’ Department.” All very
well, but where was the shop, the capital, the _clientèle_? In the tip
of Cynthia’s pencil.
She had two or three dozen sketches and one good tailored frock.
Every American woman who is successful begins with a good tailored
frock. Cynthia put hers on, took her sketches under her arm, and went
to the best dressmaking establishment in New York. That is another
characteristic of American self-appreciation: they always go straight
to the best. The haughty forewoman was bored at first, but when she
had languidly inspected a few of Cynthia’s sketches she was roused to
interest if not enthusiasm. Two days later, Cynthia took her position
as “designer for _jeunne filles_” at L----’s, at a salary which even
for New York was considerable.
Hence the capital. The _clientèle_ developed inevitably, and was soon
excuse in itself for the girl to start a place of her own. At the
end of her third year in New York, she saw her dream of independence
realized in a _chic_ little shop marked _Brand_; at the end of her
fifth the shop had evolved into an establishment of three stories.
And ten years after the girl with her thirty dollars arrived at an
East Side boarding-house, she put up a sky-scraper--at any rate an
eleven-story building--of her own; while the hall bedroom at the
boarding-house is become a beautiful apartment on Central Park West.
And meanwhile someone made the discovery that Cynthia Brand was one
of _the_ Brands of Richmond, and Society took her up. Today she is a
personage, as well as one of the keenest business women, in New York.
Marvellous, but a unique experience, you say. Unique only in degree of
success, not in the fact itself. There are hundreds, even thousands,
of Cynthia Brands plying their prosperous trades in the American
commercial capital. As photographers, decorators, restaurant and
tea-room proprietors, jewellers, florists, and specialists of every
kind, these enterprising women are calmly proving that the home is by
no means their only sphere; that in the realm of economics at least
they are the equals both in energy and intelligence of their comrade
man.
It is interesting to contrast this strongly feminist attitude of the
American woman with the suffragism of her militant British sister.
No two methods of obtaining the same result could be more different.
Years ago the American woman emancipated herself, without ostentation
or outcry, by quietly taking her place in the commonwealth as a
bread-winner. Voluntarily she stepped down from the pedestal (to which,
however, her sentimental _confrère_ promptly re-raised her), and set
about claiming her share in the business of life. To disregard her now
would be futile. She is too important; she has made herself too vital
a factor in economic activity to be disregarded when it comes to civic
matters.
And so, while Englishwomen less progressive in the true sense of the
word have been window-smashing and setting fires, the “rights” they so
ardently desire have been tranquilly and naturally acquired by their
shrewder American cousins. Fifteen of the forty-odd States now have
universal suffrage; almost every State has suffrage in some form. And
it will be a very short time--perhaps ten years, perhaps fifteen--until
all of the great continent will come under the equal rule of men and
women alike.
I had the interesting privilege of witnessing the mammoth Suffrage
Parade in New York, just before the presidential election last fall.
In more than one way, it was a revelation. After the jeering, hooting
mob at the demonstrations in Hyde Park, this absorbed, respectful crowd
that lined both sides of Fifth Avenue was even more impressive than the
procession of women itself. But seeing the latter as they marched past
twenty thousand strong gave the key to the enthusiasm of the crowd.
A fresh-faced, well-dressed, composed company of women; women of all
ages--college girls, young matrons, middle-aged mothers with their
daughters, elderly ladies and even dowagers, white-haired and hearty,
made up the inspiring throng. They greeted the cheers of the spectators
smilingly, yet with dignity; their own cheers no less ardent for being
orderly and restrained; and about their whole bearing was a sanity and
good sense, joined to a thoroughly feminine wish to please, which gave
away the secret of their popularity.
It was the American woman at her best, which means the American woman
with a steady, splendid purpose which she intends to accomplish,
and in which she enlists not only the support but the sympathy of
her fellow-men. With her own unique cleverness she goes about it.
President-elect Wilson stole into Washington the day before his
inauguration, almost unnoticed, because everyone was off to welcome
“General” Rosalie Jones and her company of petitioners: instead of
kidnapping the President (as her English sisters would have planned),
the astute young woman kidnapped the people; winning them entirely by
her sturdy good humour and daring combined, and refusing to part with a
jot of her femininity in the process.
If I have seemed to contradict myself in this brief analysis of so
complex and interesting a character as the American woman, I can only
go back to my first statement that she herself is a contradiction--only
definite within her individual type. The type of the mere woman of
pleasure, which implies the woman of wealth, I confess to finding
the extreme of vapidity and selfishness, as Americans are always the
extreme of something. This is the type the foreigner knows by heart,
and despises. But the American woman of intelligence, the woman of
clear vision, fine aim, and splendid accomplishment, he does not know;
for she is at home, earning her living.
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
AMERICAN WOMAN GOES TO WAR!
(MARCH OF THE SUFFRAGISTS ON WASHINGTON)]
V
MATRIMONY & CO.
Of all the acts which America has in solution, marriage is as yet the
most unsatisfactory, the least organized. It is easy to dismiss it
with a vague wave of the hand, and the slighting “Oh, yes--the divorce
evil.” But really to understand the problem, with all its complex
difficulties, one must go a great deal further--into the thought and
simple animal feeling of the people who harbour the divorce evil.
Physiologically speaking, Americans are made up of nerves;
psychologically they are made up of sentiment: a volatile combination,
fatal to steadiness or logic of expression. We have spoken of the
everyday habit of contact among them, the trifling touch that passes
unheeded between young men and girls, from childhood into maturity.
This is but a single phase of that diffuseness of sex energy, which
being distributed through a variety of channels, with the American,
nowhere is very profound or vital. The constant comradeship between
the two sexes, from babyhood throughout all life, makes for many fine
things; but it does not make for passion. And, as though dimly they
realize this, Americans--both men and women--seem desperately bent on
manufacturing it.
Hence their suggestive songs, their suggestive books, their crudely
suggestive plays, and, above all, their recognized game of “teasing,”
in which the young girl uses every device for plaguing the young
man--to lead him on, but never to lead him too far. Always suggestion,
never realization; as a nation they retain the adolescent point of
view to the end, playing with sex, which they do not understand, but
only vaguely feel, yet about which they have the typically adolescent
curiosity.
So much for the physiological side. It is not hard to understand how
under such conditions natural animal energy is dissipated along a
hundred avenues of mere nerve excitement and satisfaction; so that when
it comes to marriage the American man or woman can have no stored-up
wealth of passion to bestow, but simply the usual comradeship, the
usual contact intensified. This is all very well, to begin with, but
it is too slender a bond to stand the strain of daily married life.
Besides, there is the ingrained craving for novelty that has been fed
and fostered by lifelong freedom of intercourse until it is become in
itself a passion dangerously strong. A few misunderstandings, a serious
quarrel or two, and the couple who a year ago swore to cleave to one
another till death are eager to part with one another for life--and to
pass on to something new.
But a formidable stumbling-block confronts them: their ideal of
marriage. Sentiment comes to the front, outraged and demanding
appeasement. American life is grounded in sentiment. The idea of the
American man concerning the American woman, the idea of the woman
concerning the man, is a colossus of sentiment in itself. She is
all-pure, he is all-chivalrous. She would not smoke a cigarette (in
public) because he would be horrified; he would not confess to a
_liason_ (however many it might please him to enjoy), because she
would perish with shame. Each has made it a life business to forget
that the other is human, and to insist that both are impeccable. When,
therefore, before the secret tribunal of matrimony, this illusion is
condemned to death, what is to be done?
Nothing that could reflect on the innocence of the woman, or the
blamelessness of the man. In other words, the public ideal still must
be upheld. With which the public firmly agrees; and, always willing
to be hoodwinked and to hoodwink itself, makes a neat series of laws
whereby men and women may enjoy unlimited license and still remain
irreproachable. Thus the difficulty is solved, sentiment is satisfied,
and chaos mounts the throne.
I am always extremely interested in the American disgust at the
Continental marriage system. Here the inveterate sentimentalism of the
nation comes out most decided and clear. In the first place, they say,
the European has no respect for women; he orders them about, or betrays
them, with equal coolness and cruelty. He is mercenary to the last
degree in the matter of the _dot_, but himself after marriage makes
no effort to provide his wife with more than pin-money. After the
honeymoon she becomes his housekeeper and the mother of his children;
while he spends her dowry on a succession of mistresses and immoral
amusements elsewhere.
All of which, as generalization, is true. The complementary series of
facts, however, the American complacently ignores. He knows nothing,
for instance, of the European attitude to the young girl--how could
he? His own sisters and daughters are presented, even before they
are in long skirts, as objects of intimacy and flirtation; harmless
flirtation, admitted, yet scarcely the thing to produce reverence for
the recipient. Instead she is given a free-and-easy consideration,
which to the European is appalling. The latter may be a rake and a
_debauché_, but he has one religion ingrained and unimpeachable: in
the presence of a young girl he is before an altar. And throughout all
European life the young girl is accorded a delicate dignity impossible
to her less sheltered American cousin.
What good does that do her, asks the downright American, if the minute
she marries she becomes a slave? On the contrary, she gains her
liberty, where the American girl (in her own opinion at least) loses
hers; but even if she did not it is a matter open to dispute as to
which is better off in any case: the woman who is a slave, or the woman
who is master? For contentment and serenity, one must give the palm to
the European. She brings her husband money instead of marrying him for
his; she stands over herself and her expenditure, rather than over him
and his check-book; and she tends her house and bears children, rather
than roams the world in search of pleasure. Yet she is happy.
She may be deceived by her husband; if so, she is deceived far without
the confines of her own home. Within her home, as mother of her
husband’s children, she is impregnable. She may be betrayed, but she
is never vulgarized; her affairs are not dragged through the divorce
court, or jaunted about the columns of a yellow press. Whatever she
may not be to the man whom she has married, she is once and forever
the woman with whom he shares his name, and to whom he must give
his unconditional respect--or kill her. She has so much, sure and
inviolate, to stand on.
The American woman has nothing sure. In a land where all things change
with the sun, die and are shoved along breathlessly to make room for
new, she is lost in the general confusion. Today she is Mrs. Smith,
tomorrow--by her own wish, or Mr. Smith’s, or both--she is Mrs. Jones,
six months later she is Mrs. Somebody Else; and the conversation, which
includes “your children,” “my children,” and “our children,” is not a
joke in America: it is an everyday fact--for the children themselves a
tragedy.
Young people grow up among such conditions with a flippant--even
a horrible--idea of marriage. They look upon it, naturally, as an
expedient; something temporarily good, to be entered upon as such,
and without any profound thought for the future. “She married very
well,” means she married dollars, or position, or a title; in the
person of what, it does not matter. If she is dissatisfied with her
bargain, she always makes an exchange, and no one will think any the
worse of her. For, while Americans are horror-stricken at the idea
of a woman’s having a lover without the law, within the law she may
have as many as she likes, and take public sympathy and approval along
with her; so long as the farce of her _purity_ is carried out, these
sentimentalists (whom Meredith calls, in general, “self-worshippers”)
smile complaisance.
It is simply another light on the prevailing superficiality that
controls them, for that a woman shall be faithful--where she has
placed her affections of whatever sort--they neither demand nor appear
to think of at all. She may ruin her husband buying chiffons, or
maintaining an establishment beyond his means, and not a word of blame
is attached to her; on the contrary, when the husband goes bankrupt,
it is he who is outcast, while everyone speaks pitifully of “his poor
wife.” The only allegiance expected of the woman is the mere allegiance
of the body; and this in the American woman is no virtue, for she has
little or no passion to tempt her to bodily sin.
Rather, as we have seen, she is a highly nervous organism, demanding
nerve food in the shape of sensation--constant and varied. Emotionally,
she is a sort of psychic vampire, always athirst for victims to her
vanity; experience from which to gain new knowledge of herself.
This is true not only of the idle woman of society, but of the
best and intentionally most sincere. They are wholly unconscious
of it, they would indignantly refute it; yet their very system of
living proves it: throughout all classes the American woman, in the
majority, is sufficient unto herself, and--no matter in how noble a
spirit--self-absorbed.
If she is happily married, she loves her husband; but why? Because he
harmoniously complements the nature she is bent on developing. In like
fashion she loves her children--do they not contribute a tremendous
portion towards the perfect womanhood she ardently desires? And this
is not saying that the finer type of American woman is not a devoted
mother and wife; it is giving the deep, unconscious motive of her
devotion.
But take the finer type that is not married, that remains unmarried
voluntarily, and by the thousands. Take the Cynthia Brands, for
example. Americans say they stay single because “they have too good
a time,” and this is literally true. Why should they marry when they
can compass of themselves the things women generally marry for--secure
position and a comfortable home? Why, except for overpowering love
of some particular man? This the Cynthia Brands--_i. e._, women
independently successful--are seldom apt to experience. All their
energy is trained upon themselves and their ambition; and that is
never satisfied, but pushes on and on, absorbing emotion--every sort
of force in the woman--till her passion becomes completely subjective,
and marriage has nothing to offer her save the children she willingly
renounces.
Thus there is in America almost a third sex: a sex of superwomen,
in whom mentality triumphs to the sacrifice of the normal female.
One cannot say that this side of the generally admirable “self-made”
woman is appealing. It is rather hard, and leads one to speculate as
to whether the victorious bachelor girl of today is on the whole more
attractive or better off than the despised spinster of yesterday.
Of course, she has raised and strengthened the position of women,
economically speaking; socially, too. But one cannot but think that
she is after all only a partially finished superwoman, and that the
ultimate creature will have more of sweetness and strong tenderness
than one sees in the determined, rather rigid faces of the army of New
York business women of the present.
As for the New York man (whom one is forever slighting because his
rôle is so inconspicuous), we have a type much less complex--quite the
simplest type of normal male, in fact. The average New Yorker (that is,
the New Yorker of the upper middle class) is a hard-working, obvious
soul, of obvious qualities and obvious flaws. His _raison d’être_ is to
provide prodigally for his wife and children; to which end he steals
out of the house in the morning before the rest are awake, and returns
late in the evening, hurriedly to dress and accompany Madame to some
smart restaurant and the play.
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
THE TRIUMPHANT “THIRD SEX” TAKES WASHINGTON]
Here, as at the opera or fashionable reception, his duty is simply
that of background to the elaborate gorgeousness and inveterate
animation of his womenfolk. Indeed, throughout all their activities the
American husband and wife seem curiously irrelevant to one another:
they work as a tandem, not as a team. And there is no question as to
who goes first. The wife indicates the route; the husband does his
best to keep up to her. If he cannot do it, no matter what his other
excellences, he is a failure. He himself is convinced of it, hence his
tense expression of straining every nerve toward some gigantic end that
usually he is just able to compass.
The man who cannot support a woman, not in reasonable comfort, but in
the luxury she expects, thinks he has no right to her. The woman has
taught him to think it. Thus a young friend of mine, who on twenty-five
thousand a year had been engaged to a charming New York girl, told me,
simply, that of course when his income was reduced to five thousand he
could not marry her.
I asked what the girl thought about it. “Oh, she’s a trump,” he said
enthusiastically; “she wouldn’t throw me over because I’ve lost my
money. But of course she sees it’s impossible. We couldn’t go the pace.”
From which ingenuous confession we rightly gather that “the pace”
comes first with both husband and wife, in New York; the person of
one another second, if it counts at all. Their great bond of union
is the building up of certain material circumstances both covet;
their home life, their friends, their instinctive and lavish
hospitality--everything is regulated according to this. Instead of a
peaceful evening in their own drawing-room, after the man’s strenuous
day at the office, the woman’s no less strenuous day at bridge and the
dressmaker’s, they must rush into evening clothes and hasten to show
themselves where they should be seen. Other people’s pleasures become
to the American couple stern duties; to be feverishly followed, if it
helps them in ever so little toward their goal.
Thus we hear Mrs. Grey say to George: “Don’t forget we’re dining with
the Fred Baynes’ tonight. Be home early.”
“The deuce we are!” says George. “I wanted to go to the club. I detest
Bayne, anyhow.”
“Yes, but he’s President of the _Security Trust_. If you want to get
their new contract, you’d best dine, and get him to promise you. I’ve
already lunched her, so the ground’s prepared.”
“Oh, very well,” growls George; “of course you’re right. I’ll be on
hand.”
Result: They cement a friendship with two odious people whom they are
afterward obliged to invite; but George gets the contract, and twenty
thousand goes down to the family bank account. This spirit is by no
means unknown in English and Continental life, but certainly it has
its origin and prime exponents in America. No other people finds money
sufficient exchange for perpetual boredom.
The European goes where he is amused, with friends who interest him.
He dares. The American does not; having always to prove that he can
afford to be in certain places, that he is of sufficient importance to
be with certain people. America is full of ruinously expensive resorts
that have sprung up in response to this craving for self-advertisement
on the part of her “rising” sons and daughters. Squads of newspaper
reporters go with them, and the nation is kept accurately informed to
the minute as to what Mrs. Spender wore this morning at Palm Beach,
Mrs. Haveall at Newport, Mrs. Dash at Hot Springs; also how many
horses, motor cars, yachts and petty paraphernalia Charles Spender,
Jimmy Haveall, and Henry Dash are carrying about. The credit of these
men, together often with the credit of large business firms, depends on
the show they can afford to make, and the jewels their wives wear.
But I believe that no man has a duller life than the rich man--or
the moderately rich man of New York. He is generally the victim of
dyspepsia--from too rich food taken in too great a hurry; he is always
the victim of the office. Not even after he has retired, to spend
the remainder of his days in dreary luxury between his clubs and
Continental watering places, does the office habit cease to torment
him. Once and forever, it has murdered the enjoyment of leisure and
annihilated pleasure in peace.
Being naturally heavy-minded on all subjects except business, the
American man with time on his hands is in a pitiable plight. I have
met some of these poor gentlemen, wandering helplessly about the world
with their major-general wives, and I must say they are among the
most pathetic of married men. They hibernate in hotel lounges, smoking
their enormous cigars and devouring their two-weeks-old New York
newspapers; or, when they get the chance, monologuing by the hour on
their past master strokes in the land where “things hum.” Sometimes in
self-defence against the wife’s frocks and French hats, they have a
hobby: ivories, or old silver--something eminently respectable. If so,
they are apt to be laborious about it, as they are about all culture
which they graft on themselves, or have grafted on them. Sometimes they
turn their attention to sport; but the real sport of the American, man
and woman, is climbing. It is born in them, and they never actually
give it up until they die.
Meanwhile the couple who have resisted divorce and continued to climb
together turn anxious eyes on the upward advance of their children.
If the latter make a false step, mother with her trained wit must
repair it; father must foot the bill. No more extravagantly indulgent
parent exists than the American parent who himself has had to make his
own way. His children are monarchs, weightedly crowned with luxuries
they do not appreciate; and for them he slaves till death or nervous
prostration lays him low. One wonders when the nation that has lost its
head over the American girl will awake to the discovery of the American
father. For the present he is a silent, deprecatory creature, toiling
unceasingly six days of the week, and on the seventh to be found in
some unfrequented corner of the house, inundated by newspapers, or
unobtrusively building blocks in the nursery--where there is one.
As a rule, American children own the house, monopolize the conversation
at meals, which almost invariably they take with their elders--whether
there are guests or not, and are generally as arrogant and precocious
little tyrants as unlimited indulgence and admiration can make them.
They have been allowed to see and read everything their parents see and
read; they have been taken to the theatre and about the world, from
the time they could walk; they have, many of them, travelled abroad,
and are ready to discuss Paris or London with the languid nonchalance
of little old men and women; on the whole, these poor spoiled little
people, through no fault of their own, are about as unpleasant and
unnatural a type as can be found.
Instead of being kept simple and unsophisticated they are early
inculcated with the importance of money and the things it can buy.
American boys, rather than vying with one another in tennis or
swimming vie with one another in the number of motor cars they own or
sail-boats or saddle-horses, as the case may be. They would scorn the
pony that is the English boy’s delight, but it is true that many young
Americans at the tender age of twelve own their own motors, which they
drive and discuss with the _blasé_ air of men of the world. In like
fashion the little girls, from the time they can toddle, are consumed
with the idea of outdressing one another; and even give box parties
and luncheons--beginning, almost before they are out of the cradle,
to imitate their mothers in ambition and the consuming spirit of
competition.
Naturally, one is speaking of the children of the wealthy, or at
least well off; among the children of the working classes, whatever
their grade of intelligence or education, we find the same sturdy
independence and ability that characterizes their mothers and fathers.
But all American children are sophisticated--one glance at a daily
newspaper is enough to make them so; and they live in an atmosphere
of worldly wisdom and knowledge of the sordid, which those of us who
believe that childhood should be ingenuous and gay find rather sad.
The little pitchers, in this case, have not only big ears but eyes and
wits sharp to perceive the sorry things they would naturally learn soon
enough.
They are allowed to wander, unshielded, among the perplexing mixed
motives, the standards in disarray, of this theatre where life in its
myriad relations is still in adjustment. Like small troubled gnomes
seeking light, they flit across the hazardous stage; where their
more experienced leaders have yet to extricate order out of a sea of
sentimental hypocrisies, inflated ideals, and makeshift laws.
American men and women have been at great pains to construct “a world
not better than the world it curtains, only foolisher.” They have
obstinately refused to admit one another as they actually are--which,
after all, is a remarkably fine race of beings; preferring the
pretty flimsiness of a house of cards of their own making to the
indestructible mansion of humanity. When their passion for inventing
shall be converted into an equally ardent passion for reflecting--as it
surely will be--they will see their mistake in a trice; and, from that
time, they are destined to be not a collection of finely tuned nervous
organisms, but a splendid race of thinking creatures.
II
THE CURTAIN RISES
(Paris)
I
ON THE GREAT ARTISTE
Out of the turmoil and struggling confusion of rehearsal, to gaze on
the finished performance of the great _artiste_! For in Paris we are
before the curtain, not behind it; and few foreigners, though they may
adopt the city for their own, and lovingly study it for many years, are
granted more than an occasional rare glimpse of its personality without
the stage between. From that safe distance, Paris coquets with you,
rails at you, laughs and weeps for you; but first she has handed you a
programme, which informs you that she does the same for all the world,
at a certain hour each day, and for a fixed price. And if ever in the
ardour of your admiration you show signs of forgetting, of seeking her
personal favour by a rash gesture or smile, she points you imperiously
to the barricade of the footlights--or vanishes completely, in the
haughtiness of her ire.
Therefore, the tourist will tell you, Paris is not satisfactory.
Because to his greedy curiosity she does not open her soul as she does
the gates of her art treasures and museums, he pronounces her shallow,
mercenary, heartless, even wicked. As her frankness in some things
is foreign to his hypocrisy, as her complex unmorality resists his
facile analysis, he grasps what he can of her; and goes away annoyed.
Really to know Paris is to offer in advance a store of tolerance for
her inconsistencies, patience for her whims, and the sincere desire to
learn finally to see behind her mask--not to snatch it rudely from her
face.
But this cannot be done in the curt fortnight which generally limits
the casual visitor’s acquaintance. Months and years must be spent,
if true knowledge of the City of Light is to be won. We can only, in
our brief survey of its more significant phases, indicate a guide to
further study of a place and people well worth a wider scrutiny.
The most prejudiced will not deny that Paris is beautiful; or that
there is about her streets and broad, tree-lined avenues a graciousness
at once dignified and gay. Stand, as the ordinary tourist does on
his first day, in the flowering square before the Louvre; in the
foreground are the fountains and bright tulip-bordered paths of the
Tuileries--here a glint of gold, there a soft flash of marble statuary,
shining through the trees; in the centre the round lake where the
children sail their boats. Beyond spreads the wide sweep of the Place
de la Concorde, with its obelisk of terrible significance, its larger
fountains throwing brilliant jets of spray; and then the trailing,
upward vista of the Champs Elysées to the great triumphal Arch: yes,
even to the most indifferent, Paris is beautiful.
To the subtler of appreciation, she is more than beautiful: she is
impressive. For behind the studied elegance of architecture, the
elaborate simplicity of gardens, the carefully lavish use of sculpture
and delicate spray, is visible the imagination of a race of passionate
creators--the imagination, throughout, of the great artist. One meets
it at every turn and corner, down dim passageways, up steep hills,
across bridges, along sinuous quays: the masterhand and its “infinite
capacity for taking pains.” And so marvellously do its manifestations
of many periods through many ages combine to enhance one another that
one is convinced that the genius of Paris has been perennial; that St.
Genevieve, her godmother, bestowed it as an immortal gift when the city
was born.
From earliest days every man seems to have caught the spirit of
the man who came before, and to have perpetuated it; by adding his
own distinctive yet always harmonious contribution to the gradual
development of the whole. One built a stately avenue; another erected
a church at the end; a third added a garden on the other side of the
church, and terraces leading up to it; a fourth and fifth cut streets
that should give from the remaining two sides into other flowery
squares with their fine edifices. And so from every viewpoint, and from
every part of the entire city, today we have an unbroken series of
vistas--each one different and more charming than the last.
History has lent its hand to the process, too; and romance--it is not
an insipid chain of flowerbeds we have to follow, but the holy warriors
of Saint Louis, the roistering braves of Henry the Great, the gallant
Bourbons, the ill-starred Bonapartes. These as they passed have left
their monuments; it may be only in a crumbling old chapel or ruined
tower, but there they are: eloquent of days that are dead, of a spirit
that lives forever staunch in the heart of the fervent French people.
It comes over one overwhelmingly sometimes, in the midst of the
careless gaiety of the modern city: the old, ever-burning spirit of
rebellion and savage strife that underlies it all; and that can spring
to the surface now on certain memorable days, with a vehemence that is
terrifying. Look across the Pont Alexandre, at the serene gold dome
of the Invalides, surrounded by its sleepy barracks. Suddenly you are
in the fires and awful slaughter of Napoleon’s wars. The flower of
France is being pitilessly cut down for the lust of one man’s ambition;
and when that is spent, and the wail of the widowed country pierces
heaven with its desolation, a costly asylum is built for the handful of
soldiers who are left--and the great Emperor has done his duty!
Or you are walking through the Cité, past the court of the Palais
de Justice. You glance in, carelessly--memory rushes upon you--and
the court flows with blood, “so that men waded through it, up to the
knees!” In the tiny stone-walled room yonder, Marie Antoinette sits
disdainfully composed before her keepers; though her face is white with
the sounds she hears, as her friends and followers are led out to swell
that hideous river of blood.
A pretty, artificial city, Paris; good for shopping, and naughty
amusements, now and then. History? Oh yes, of course; but all that’s so
dry and uninspiring, and besides it happened so long ago.
Did it? In your stroll along the Rue Royale, among the jewellers’ and
milliners’ shops and Maxim’s, glance up at the Madeleine, down at the
obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Little over a hundred years ago,
this was the brief distance between life and death for those who one
minute were dancing in the “Temple of Victory,” the next were laying
their heads upon the block of the guillotine. Can you see, beyond the
shadowy grey pillars of the Temple, that brilliant circling throng
within? The reckless-laughing ballet girl in her shrine as “Goddess,”
her worshippers treading their wild measures among the candles and
crucifixes and holy images, as though they are pursued? Look--a grim
presence is at the door. He enters, lays a heavy hand upon the shoulder
of a young and beautiful dancer. She looks into his face, and smiles.
The music never stops, but goes more madly on; as the one demanded
makes a low _révérence_, then rising, throws a kiss over her shoulder
to her comrades who in turn salute her; calls a gay “Adieu!” and with
the smile still terrible upon her lips--is gone.
Ah, but the French are different now, you say. Those were the
aristocrats, the _vieille noblesse_; these modern Republicans are of
another breed. And yet the same blood flows in their veins, the same
scornful courage animates them--who, for example, leads the world in
aviation?--and on days like the fourteenth of July (the anniversary
of the storming of the Bastille), the common people at least show a
patriotism no less fiery if less ferocious than they showed in 1789.
Let us see if they are so different after all.
The first charge against the French invariably is that of
artificiality. Anglo-Saxons admit them to be charming, of a delightful
wit and keen intelligence; but, they immediately add, how deep does it
go? Superficially, the Parisian is vastly agreeable; courteous to the
point of extravagance, an accomplished conversationalist, even now and
then with a flash of the profound. Probe him, and what do you find? A
cynical, world-weary degenerate, who will laugh at you when your back
is turned, and make love to your wife before your very eyes!
[Illustration: AN OPEN-AIR BALL ON THE 14TH JULY]
And why not? You should appreciate the compliment to your good
taste. It is when he begins to make love behind one’s back that one
must beware of one’s French friend; for he is a finished artist at
the performance, and women know it, and are prepared in advance to
be subdued. He is by no means a degenerate, however, the average
Frenchman; he has to work too hard, and besides he has not the money
degeneracy costs. He may have his “_petite amie_,” generally he
has; but quite as generally she is a wholesome, well-behaved little
person,--a dressmaker in a small way, or _vendeuse_ in a shop--content
to drink a bock with him in the evening, at their favourite café, and
on Sundays to hang on his arm during their excursion to St. Germain or
Meudon. Just as a very small percentage of New Yorkers are those who
dwell in Wall Street and corner stocks, so a very small percentage of
Parisians are those who feed _louis_ to night restaurants and carouse
till morning with riotous demi-mondaines.
It is a platitude that foreigners are the ones who support the immoral
resorts of Paris; yet no foreigner seems to care to remember the
platitude. The best way to convince oneself of it forever is to visit
a series of these places, and take honest note of their personnel. The
employés will be found to be French; but ninety-eight per cent. of the
patrons are English, German, Italian, Spanish, and North and South
American. The retort is made that nevertheless the Parisians started
such establishments in the first place. They did; but only after the
stranger had brought his crude sensuality to their variety theatres
and night cafés, stripping the first of their racy wit, the second of
their rollicking _bonhomie_, taking note only of the license underlying
both--and blatantly revelling in it. Then it was that the ever-alert
commercial sense of the Frenchman awoke to a new method of making money
out of foreigners; and the vulgar night-restaurant of today had its
beginning.
But not only in the matter of degeneracy is the common analysis of the
Parisian open to refutation; his inveterate cynicism also comes up
for doubt. The attitude that calls forth this mistaken conclusion on
the part of those not well acquainted with French character is more
or less the attitude of every instinctively dramatic nature: a kind
of impersonal detachment, which causes the individual to appreciate
situations and events first as bits of drama, _seen_ in their relation
to himself. Thus, during the recent scandal of the motor bandits, I
have heard policemen laugh heartily at some clever trick of evasion on
the part of the criminals; only to see them turn purple with rage the
next minute, on realizing the insult to their own intelligence.
A better example is the story of the little _midinette_ who, though
starving, would not yield to her former _patron_ (desirous also of
being her lover), and whom the latter shot through the heart as she was
hurrying along the Quai Passy late at night. “_Quel phenomène_!” she
exclaimed, with a faint shrug, as her life ebbed away in the corner
_brasserie_; “to be shot, while on the way to drown oneself--_c’est
inoui_!” The next moment she was dead. And all she had to say was,
“what a phenomenon--it’s unheard of!”
Is this cynicism? Or is it not rather the characteristic impersonality
of the histrionic temper, which causes the artist, even in death, to
gaze at herself and at the scene, as it were, from the critical vantage
of the wings? And the light shrug--which so often grounds the idea of
heartlessness, or simply of shallow frivolity, in the judgment of the
stranger--look closer, and you will see it hiding a brave stoicism that
this race of born actors makes every effort to conceal. The French
throughout embody so complex a combination of Latin ardour, Spartan
endurance, and Greek ideality as to render them extremely difficult of
any but the most superficial comprehension. They laugh at things that
make other people shudder; they take fire at things that leave other
people cold; they burn with a white flame for beauties other people
never see. As a great English writer has said, “below your level,
they’re above it:--and a paradox is at home with them!”
But I do not think that they are always ridiculing the foreigner, when
the latter is uncomfortably conscious of their smiling glance upon
him. There are travelling types at whom everyone laughs, and these
delight the Frenchman’s keen humour; but the ordinary stranger has
become so commonplace to Paris that, unless he or she is especially
distinguished, no one takes any notice. Here, however, we have in
a nutshell the reason for that smile that sometimes irritates the
foreigner: it is often a smile of pure admiration. The great artist’s
eye knows no distinction of nationality or an iota of provincial
prejudice. When it lights upon ugliness, it is disgusted--or amused,
if the ugliness has a touch of the comic; when, on the other hand, it
lights upon beauty--and how instant it is to spy out the most obscure
trait of this--enthusiasm is kindled, regardless of kind or race, and
the _vif_ French features break into a smile of pleased appreciation.
Here, he would say, is someone who contributes to the scene; someone
who helps to make, not mar, the radiant _ensemble_ we are striving for.
Paris, as no other city in the world, offers a playhouse of brilliant
and charming _mise-en-scène_; and gives the visitor subtly to
understand that she expects him to live up to it. Otherwise she has
no interest in him. For the well-tailored Englishman, the striking
_Américaine_, for anyone and everyone who can claim title to that
supreme quality, _chic_, Paris is ready to open her arms and cry
kinship. Those whom she favours, however, are held strictly to the mark
of her fine standard of the exquisite; and if they falter--oblivion.
“I am never in Paris two hours,” said an American friend of mine,
“before I begin to perk and prink, and furbish up everything I have.
One feels that each man and woman in the street knows the very buttons
of one’s gloves, and quality of one’s stockings; and that every detail
of one’s costume _must_ be right.” Many people have voiced the same
impression: as of being consciously and constantly “on view”--before
spectators keenly critical. The curtain seems to rise on oneself alone
in the centre of the stage, and never to go down until the last pair of
those appraising eyes has passed on.
It is a very different appraisement, however, from the “inventory
stare” of Fifth Avenue. Here, not money value but beauty of line--blend
of colour, grace, _verve_--is the criterion. And the modestly gowned
little _midinette_ receives as many admiring glances as the gorgeous
demi-mondaine, if only she has contrived an original cut to her frock,
or tied a clever, new kind of bow to her hat. Novelty, novelty, is the
cry of the exacting _artiste_; and who obeys wins approval--who has
exhausted imagination is laid upon the shelf.
But, again, this is not the shifting, impermanent temper of Madame New
York; it is the fickle variability of the great artist, exercising
her eternal prerogative: caprice. She accepts a fashion one week,
discards it the next for one newer; throws that aside two days later,
and demands to know where everyone’s ideas have gone. It is not that
she is pettish, but simply that she is used to being slaved for, and to
being pleased--by something different, something more charming every
hour. Infinite pains are taken to produce the merest trifle she may
fancy. Look from your window into the rows of windows up and down the
street, or that line your court: everywhere people are sewing, fitting
minute bits of delicate stuffs into a pattern, threading tiny pearls
to make a border, straining their eyes in dark work-rooms,--toiling
indefatigably--to create some fragile, lovely thing that will be
snatched up, worn once or twice, and tossed aside, forgotten for the
rest of time.
Yet no one of the workers seems to grow impatient or disheartened
over this; the faces bent absorbedly over their tasks are bright with
interest, alert and full of eagerness to make something that will
captivate the difficult mistress, if only for an hour. They may never
see her--when she comes to inspect their handiwork, they are shut
behind a dingy door; at best, they may only catch a glimpse of her as
she enters her carriage, or sweeps past them outside some brilliant
theatre of her pleasure. But one cries to another: “She’s wearing my
fichu!” The other cries back: “And I draped her skirt!” And supreme
contentment illumines each face, for each has helped towards the
goddess’s perfection--and they are satisfied.
As I heard one unimportant little _couturière_ remark, “_Dieu merci_,
in Paris we _all_ are artists!” And so they all are responsible for
the finished success of the star. One cannot help contrasting this
ideal that animates the most insignificant of them--the ideal of sheer
beauty, towards which they passionately toil to attain--with the stolid
“what-do-I-get-out-of-it” attitude of the Anglo-Saxon artisan. French
working people are poorly paid, they have little joy in life beyond
the joy of what they create with their fingers; yet there is about
them a fine contentment, an almost radiance, that is inspiring only to
look upon. When they do have a few francs for pleasure, you will find
them at the _Français_ or the _Odéon_--the best to be had is their
criterion; and when the theatres are out of their reach, on Sundays
and holidays they crowd the galleries and museums, exchanging keenly
intelligent comment as they scrutinize one masterpiece after another.
The culture of the nation, at least, is not artificial; but deep-rooted
as no other race can claim: in the poorest _ouvrier_, no less than
in the most polished gentleman, there exists the insatiable instinct
for what is fine and worthy to be assimilated. And if the prejudiced
concede this perhaps, but add that it remains an intellectual instinct
always--an artistic instinct, while the heart of French people is
callous and cold, one may suggest that there are two kinds of artists:
those who give away their hearts in their art, and those who jealously
hide theirs lest the vulgar tear it to pieces.
And the _great_ artiste, however gracious she may be for us, however
kind may be her smile, never lets us forget that we are before a
curtain; which, though she may draw it aside and give us brief glimpses
of her wonder, conceals some things too precious to be shown.
II
ON HER EVERYDAY PERFORMANCE
Sight-seeing in Paris must be like looking at the Venus of Milo on
a roll of cinematograph films--an experience too harrowing to be
remembered. I am sure it is the better part of discretion to forswear
Baedeker, and without system just to “poke round.” Thus one catches the
artists, in the multiform moods of their life, as ordinary beings; and
stumbles across historic wonders enough into the bargain.
Really to take Paris unawares, one must get up in the morning before
she does, and slip out into the street when the white-bloused baker’s
boy and a sleepy _cocher_ or two, with their drowsy, dawdling horses,
are all the life to be seen. One walks along the empty boulevards,
down the quiet Rue de la Paix, into the stately serenity of the
Place Vendôme and on across the shining Seine into the grey, ancient
stillness of the crooked Rue du Bac. And in this early morning calm, of
solitary spaces and clear sunshine, fresh-sprinkled streets and gently
fluttering trees, one meets with a new and altogether different Paris
from the dazzling, exotic city one knows by day and at night.
Absent is the snort and reckless rush of motors, the insistent jangling
of tram and horse’s bells, the rumble of carts and clip-clop of their
Norman stallions’ feet; absent the hurrying, kaleidoscopic throngs who
issue from the subway stations and fill the thoroughfares; absent even
that familiar smell-of-the-city which in Paris is a fusion of gasoline,
wet asphalt, and the faint fragrance of women’s _sachet_: this virgin
morning peace is without odour save the odour of fresh leaves, without
noise, without the bustle of moving people. The city stretches its
broad arms North and South, East and West, like a serene woman in the
embrace of tranquil dreams; and suggests a soft and beautiful repose.
But, while still you are drinking deep of it, she stirs--opens her
eyes. A distant cry is heard: “_E-e-eh, pommes de terre-eeeeh!_” And
then another: “_Les petites fraises du bois! Les petites fraises!_” And
the cries come nearer, and there is the sound of steps and the creak of
a hand-cart; and Paris rubs her eyes and wakes up--she must go out and
buy potatoes!
The same fat, brown-faced woman with the same two dogs--one pulling
the cart, one running fussily along-side--has sold potatoes in the
same streets round the Place Vendôme, ever since I can remember. For
years, her lingering vibrant cry has roused this part of Paris to the
first sign of day. And while she is making change, and gossiping with
the concierge, and the smaller dog is sniffing impatiently round her
skirts, windows are opened, gratings groan up, at the corner some
workmen call to one another--and the day is begun.
While the streets are still comparatively empty, let us follow the
first abroad--the little _midinette_ (shop-girl) and her mother--to
mass. They will choose one of the old, unfashionable churches, like
St. Roch or _La Trinité_; though on Sundays they go to the Madeleine
to hear the music, and revel in splendid pomp and pageantry. France at
heart is agnostic; a nation of fatalists, if anything. But the vivid
French imagination is held in thrall by the colour and mystic ritual
of the Catholic church: by the most perfect in ceremonial and detail
of all religions. When the curtain rises on the full magnificence of
gorgeous altar, golden-robed bishop and officiating priests; when, in
accompaniment to the sonorous _Aves_, exquisite music peals forth, and
the whole is blended, melted together by the soft light of candles, the
subtle haze of incense: into French faces comes that ecstasy with which
they greet the perfect in all its manifestations. They are _dévotes_ of
beauty in the religious as in every other scene.
But now our _midinette_ and her _maman_ enter a dusky unpretentious
old church, where quietly they say their prayers and listen to the
monotonous chanting of a single priest, reading matins in a little
corner chapel. The two women cross themselves, and go out. In the
_Place_, the younger one stops to spend twopence for a spray of
muguet--that delicate flower (the lily-of-the-valley) that is the
special property of the _midinettes_ of Paris, and that they love. On
their Saint Catherine’s Day (May 1st), no girl is without a little
bunch of it as a “_porte-bonheur_” for her love affairs during the next
year.
But the _midinette_ calls, “_au ’voir_”; and the _maman_ returns, “_à
ce soir_!” And they disappear, the one to her shop, the other to her
duties as concierge or storekeeper, and we are left in the Place alone.
What about coffee? Let us take it here at the corner brasserie, where
the old man with his napkin tucked in his chin is crumbling “crescents”
and muttering imprecations at the government--which he attacks through
the _Matin_ or _Figaro_ spread upon his knees. A young man, with
melancholy black moustaches and orange boots, is the only other client
at this early hour. He refuses to eat, though a _café complet_ is
before him; and looks at his watch, and sighs. We know what is the
matter with _him_.
Considerate of the lady who is late, we choose a table on the other
side--all are outdoors of course, in this Springtime of the year--and
devote ourselves to discussing honey and rolls and the season’s styles
in hosiery, which young persons strolling towards the boulevard
benevolently offer for our inspection. Occasionally they pause,
and graciously inquire if we “have need of someone?” And on our
replying--with the proper mixture of apology and admiration--that all
our wants seem to be attended to, pass on with a shrug of resignation.
Motor-buses are whirring by now, and a maze of _fiacres_, taxis,
delivery-boy’s bicycles, and heavy trucks skid round the slippery
corner in dangerous confusion. The traffic laws of Paris are of the
vaguest, and policemen are few and far between; all at once, the Place
seems unbearably thick and full of noise. We call for our _addition_,
exchange complaisances with the waiter, and depart--just as the young
man with the orange boots, with a cry of “_enfin!_” tucks the hand of a
bewitchingly pretty young lady (doubtless a mannequin) within his arm,
and starts towards the Rue de la Paix.
The Rue de la Paix at half past nine in the morning does not
intrigue us. We prefer to wait for it until the sensational _heure
des rendez-vous_, in the evening. Why not jump into a cab and bowl
leisurely out to the Bois? It will be cool there, and quiet during
the hour before the fashionable _cavaliers_ come to ride. With a wary
eye for a horse of reasonable solidity, we engage a blear-eyed Gaul
to tow us to the Porte Dauphine. We like this Gaul above other Gauls,
because his anxious flop-eared dog sitting next to him on the box
gives every sign of liking him. And though, even before we have turned
into the Champs Elysées, there have been three blood-curdling rows
between cabby and various colleagues who presumed to occupy a place in
the same street; though whips have been brandished and such ferocious
epithets as “brother-in-law of a bantam!” “son of a pigeon-toed hen!”
have been brandished without mercy by our remorseless Jehu, we take the
reassuring word of his dog’s worshipping brown eyes that he is not a
bad sort after all.
He cracks us out the Champs Elysées at a smart pace; yet we have
time to gloat over the beauties of this loveliest of all avenues:
its spacious gardens, its brilliant flower-plots, its quaint little
_guignols_ and donkey carriages for children. Vendors of jumping
bunnies and squeaking pigs thread in and out the shady trees, showing
their fascinating wares; and one does not wonder at the swarm of
small people with their bright-ribboned nurses, who flock round to
admire--and to buy.
This part of the avenue--from the Concorde to the Rond-Point--is given
over to children; and all kinds of amusements, wise and unwise, are
prepared for them. But by far the most popular are the _guignols_:
those theatres-in-little, where Punch and Judy go through their
harassing adventures, to the accompaniment of “_c’est joli, ça!_”
and “_tiens, que c’est chic!_”; uttered by enthusiastic small French
throats, seconded by applauding small French hands. For in Paris even
the babies have their appreciation for the drama that is offered them
before they can talk; and show it so spontaneously, yet emphatically,
that one is arrested by their vehemence.
But we can take in these things only in passing, for Jehu and the
flop-eared dog are carrying us on up the suavely mounting avenue,
beyond the haughty portals of fashionable hotels and automobile houses
_de luxe_; round the stately Arc de Triomphe, and into the Avenue du
Bois. Here a sprinkling of governesses and their charges, old ladies,
and lazy young men are ranged along in the stiff luxury of penny
chairs. On a Sunday we might stop and take one ourselves, to watch
the parade of toilettes and the lively Parisian _jeunesse_ at its
favourite game of “_faire le flirt_”; but this morning the terrace
is half asleep, and above it the houses of American millionaires and
famous ladies of the demi-monde turn forbidding closed shutters to our
inquiring gaze. Jehu speeds us past them, and we alight at the Porte
Dauphine, the principal entrance to the Bois.
Green grass, the glint of a lake, broad, sandy roads and intimate
slim _allées_ greet us, once within the gates; while all round and
overhead are the slender, grey-green French poplars, fashioned into
gracious avenues and seductive pathways, with its gay little restaurant
at the end. Of all styles and architecture are these last: Swiss
châlets, Chinese pagodas, Japanese tea-houses, and the typical French
_pavillon_; they have one common trait, however--that of serving
atrocious food at a fabulous price. Let us abjure them, and wander
instead along the quite expansive lake, to the rocks and miniature
falls of _Les Rochers_.
All through the Bois one is struck with the characteristic French
passion for vistas. There is none of the natural wildness of Central
Park, or the uninterrupted sweep of green fields that gives the charm
of air and openness to the parks of London; but--though here in Paris
we are in a “wood”--everywhere there is the elaborate simplicity of
French landscape gardening: trees cut into tall Gothic arches, or
bent into round, tunnel-like curves; brush trimmed precisely into
formal box hedges; paths leading into avenues, that in turn lead
into other avenues--so that before, behind, and on every side there
is that prolonged silver-grey perspective. One sees the same thing at
Versailles and St. Cloud: in every French forest, for that matter. The
artist cannot stay her hand, even for the hand of nature.
And so, in the Bois, rocks have been built into grottos, and trickling
waterfalls trained to form cascades above them; and little lakes and
islands have been inserted--everything, anything, that the artistic
imagination could conceive, to enhance the sylvan scene for the
critical actors who frequent it. Which reminds us that these last will
be on view now--it is eleven o’clock, their hour for riding and the
promenade. So let us leave _Les Rochers_, and the greedy goats of the
_Pré Catalan_, and hasten back to the Avenue des Acaçias and the famous
Sentier de Vertu.
Here, a _chic_ procession of _élégantes_ and their admirers are
strolling along, laughing and chatting as they come upon acquaintances,
forming animated little groups, only to break up and wander on to
join others. Cavaliers in smart English coats, or the dashing St.
Cyr uniform, canter by; calling gay greeting to friends, for whose
benefit they display an elaborately careless bit of clever horsemenship
_en passant_. Ladies and “half-ladies” in habits of startling yet
somehow alluring cut and hue--heliotrope and brick pink are among the
favourites--allow their mounts to saunter lazily along the allées,
while their own modestly veiled eyes spy out prey. They are viewed with
severity by the _bonne bourgeoise_ of the tortoise-shell lorgnettes
and heavy moustache; who keeps her limousine within impressive calling
distance, while she, with her fat poodle under her arm, waddles along
ogling the beaux.
A doughty regiment of these there are: young men with marvellous
waists and eager, searching eyes; middle-aged men with figures “well
preserved,” and eyes that make a desperate effort at eagerness, but
only succeed in looking tired; and then the old gallants, waxed and
varnished, and gorgeously immaculate, from sandy toupée to gleaming
pointed shoes--the three hours they have spent with the barber and in
the scrupulous hands of their valet have not been in vain. They do the
honours of the _Sentier_, with a courtliness that brings back Louis
Quatorze and the days of Ninon and the lovely Montespan.
But there are as lovely--and perhaps as naughty?--ladies among these
who saunter leisurely down the grey-green paths today. In wonderfully
simple, wonderfully complicated _toilettes de matin_, they stroll
along in pairs--or again (with an oblique glance over the shoulder,
oh a quite indifferent glance), carelessly alone with two or three
little dogs. I read last week in one of the French illustrated
papers a serious treatise on ladies’ dogs. It was divided into the
three categories: “Dogs for morning,” “Dogs for afternoon,” “Dogs of
ceremony”--meaning full-dress dogs. And the article gravely discussed
the correct canine accessory that should be worn with each separate
costume of the _élégante’s_ elaborate day. It omitted to add, however,
the incidental value of these costly scraps of fuzz, as chaperones.
But with a couple of dogs, as one pretty lady softly assured me, one
can go anywhere, feeling _quite_ secure; and one’s husband, too--for of
course he realizes that the sweet little beasts _must_ be exercised!
So the conscientious ladies regularly “exercise” them; and if
sometimes, in their exuberance, Toto and Mimi escape their distressed
young mistresses, and must be brought back by a friend who “chanced” to
be near at hand--who can cavil? And if the kind restorer walks a little
way with the trio he has reunited, or sits with them for a few moments
under the trees, why not? They are always three--Toto and Mimi and the
lady--and one’s friends who may happen to pass know for themselves how
hard dogs are to keep in hand!
So we have a series of gay, well-dressed couples wandering down the
intimate allées, or scattered in the white iron chairs within the
trees: a very different series from those who will be here at eleven
o’clock tonight--and every night. The Bois is far too large to be
policed, and the grotesque shapes that haunt it after dark--crouching,
low-browed figures that slink along in the shadows, greedy for any sort
of prey--make one shudder, even from the security of a closed cab.
All about are the brilliant, bright-lit restaurants with their crowds
of feasting sybarites; yet at the very door of these--waiting to fall
upon them if they take six steps beyond the threshold--is that grisly,
desperate band, some say of Apaches, others say monsters worse than
those.
At all events, it is better in the evening to turn one’s eyes away
from the shadowy paths, and towards the amusing tableaux to be seen in
passing fiacres and taxis. To the more reserved Anglo-Saxon, French
frankness of demonstration in affairs of the affections comes always
as a bit of a shock. To see a lady reclining against the arm of a
gentleman, as the two spin along the boulevard in an open horse-cab; to
watch them, quite oblivious of the world looking on, ardently turn and
kiss one another: this is a disturbing and meanly provocative scene to
put before the susceptible American. No one else pays any attention to
it--they have acted that scene so many times themselves; and when, in
the friendly darkness of the Bois at night, all lingering discretion
is thrown to the winds, and behind the cabby’s broad, habituated back
anything and everything in the way of fervid love-making goes on--who
cares? Except to smile sympathetically, and return to his own affair,
more ardently than ever. The silhouettes one sees against taxi-windows
and the dust-coloured cushions of _fiacres_ are utterly demoralizing to
respectable American virtue.
Let us turn on the light of day, therefore, and in a spasm of prudence
mount a penny-bus that traffics between the Étoile and the Latin
Quarter. It is a flagrant _faux-pas_ to arrive in the Latin Quarter by
way of anything more sumptuous than a penny-bus or a twopenny tram. It
shrieks it from the cobbles, that one is a “_nouveau_”; and that, in
the Quarter, is a disgrace too horrible to be endured.
We rock across the Pont Royal, then, on the precarious upper story of
an omnibus; and wind along the narrow Rue du Bac, which, since our
visit of early morning, has waked to fitful life in its old plaster
and print shops. Second-hand dealers of all kinds flourish here, and
the medley of ancient books, musty reliquaries, antique jewelry, and
battered images minus such trifles as a nose or ear, makes the street
into one continuous curiosity-shop. Until one reaches the varnish
and modern bustle of the Bon Marché stores; then, when we have been
shot through the weather-beaten slit of the Rue des Saints Pères, I
insist that we shall climb down and go on foot up quaint, irregular
Notre-Dame-des-Champs to the garden where I spent many joyous days as a
student.
It is in a crooked little street which runs breathlessly for a block
between Notre-Dame-des-Champs and the Boulevard Montparnasse--and there
stops; leaving you with the insinuation that it has done its best to
squeeze in on this frazzled boundary of the old Quarter, and that more
cannot be expected of it. On one side of the abrupt block, rambles
the one-time _hôtel_ of the Duchesse de Chevreuse; _intrigante_,
cosmopolitan, irresponsible lover of adventure, who kept Louis XIII’s
court in a hubbub with her pranks and her inordinate influence over
Queen Anne.
The grey court that has seen the trysts of Chalais, Louvigni, even
of the great Richelieu himself, rests still intact; and they say the
traditional secret passage also--leading from a hidden recess in the
garden to the _grands palais_. But that is only legend (which, by some
vagary, still clings to the feelers of the practical twentieth century
mind), and I have never seen it. The _hôtel_ is now covered yearly with
a neat coat of yellow paint, and used as an apartment house; crowded by
the usual rows of little Quarter shops: a cobbler’s, a blanchissage,
a goldsmith’s on the East wing; the beaten-down door of an antiquary
on the West: until its outraged painted bricks seem to bulge out over
the thread of a side-walk, in continual effort to rub noses with the
_hôpital_ opposite--the only other house of any age in the street.
One peep at the garden--and you will admit it is worth it, with its
lovely plaintive iris, its pale wistaria, its foolish pattering
fountain--and we turn towards the Boulevard and lunch. I have said
this bit of a street along which we are walking is on the boundary of
the old Quarter. Alas, in these days there is no Quarter. One tries to
think there is, particularly if one is a new-comer to the Left Bank,
and enthusiastic; but one learns all too soon that there is not. There
are students, yes, and artists; and the cafés and paintshops and pretty
grisettes that go with students and artists. But the quarter of Rudolph
and Mimi, of Trilby and Svengali: can you find it in steam-heated
apartments, where ladies in Worth gowns pour tea? Or in the thick blue
haze about the bridge and poker games at the Café du Dôme?
The Quarter has passed; there remains only its name. And that we should
use with a muttered “forgive us our trespasses”; for it is the name of
romance, shifted onto commonplaceness.
Yet one can still enjoy there the romance of a delicious meal for two
francs fifty; and there are any number of jealously hidden places from
which to choose. Let us go to Henriette’s, this tiny hole-in-the-wall,
where one passes the fragrant-steaming kitchen on the way to the little
room inside, and calls a greeting to the cook--an old friend--where
he stands, lobster-pink and beaming, over his copper sauce-pans. Back
under a patched and hoary skylight the tables are placed; and a family
of mild-mannered mice clamber out over the glass to peer inquiringly
at the gluttons below--who eat at one bite enough cheese to keep any
decently delicate mouse for a week.
We order an omelette _aux champignons_, a Chateaubriand (corresponding
to our tenderloin of steak) with pommes soufflés; as a separate
vegetable, _petits pois à la Française_, and for dessert a heaping
plate of wild strawberries to be eaten with one of these delectable
brown pots of thick _crême d’Isigny_--aih! It makes one exquisitely
languid only to think of it, all that luscious food! We lean back
voluptuously in our stiff little chairs, and gaze about us while
waiting for it.
At the half dozen tables round us are seated the modern prototypes
of Rudolph and Mimi: mildly boisterous American youths from the
Beaux Arts and Julien’s; careworn English spinsters with freckles
and paint-smudged fingers; a Russian couple, with curious “shocked”
hair and vivid, roving black eyes; a stray Frenchman or two, probably
shop-keepers from the Boulevard, and a trio of models--red-lipped,
torrid-eyed, sinuously round, in their sheath-fitting tailored skirts
and cheap blouses. They are making a nonchalant meal off bread and
cheese, and a bottle of _vin ordinaire_: evidently times are bad, or
“_ce bon garçon_ Harry’s” remittance has not come.
Proof of other bad times is in the charming frieze painted, in
commemoration of the Queen of Hearts, by two girl artists of a former
day, who worked out their over-due bill to the house in this decorative
fashion. For the poverty, at least, of the traditional Quarter
survives; though smothered into side streets and obscure “passages” by
the self-styled “Bohemians” of Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse. And
one notices that the habitués of Henriette’s and of all the humbler
restaurants have their own napkin-rings which they take from the rack
as they come in; does it not save them ten centimes, an entire penny,
on the charge for _couvert_?
They have their own tobacco too, and roll their cigarettes with care
not to spill a single leaf at the process; and you feel a heartless
Dives to sit smoking your fragrant Egyptians after your luxurious meal
and sipping golden Bénédictine at the considerable price of forty
centimes (eight cents). Our more frugal neighbours, however, show
no sign of envy, or indeed of interest of any sort; their careless
indifference not only to us, but to their own meal and the desultory
chatter of their comrades, speaks of long and familiar experience
with both. Somehow they are depressing, these Rudolphs without their
velveteens, these Mimis without their flowers and other romantic
trappings of poverty; the hideous modern garments of the shabbily
genteel only emphasize a sordid lack of petty cash.
I suggest that we run away from them, and hie us to the lilac-bushes
and bewitching _bébés_ of the Jardin du Luxembourg; for in the realm
of the great _artiste_ even the babies contribute to the scene, and
in their fascinating short frocks, and wee rose-trimmed bonnets,
are a gladsome troupe of Lilliputians with whom to while away one’s
melancholy. But you may have an inhuman apathy towards babies, and
prefer to taxi out to St. Germain for a view of the terrace, and a
glimpse en route of sadly lovely Malmaison--the memory-haunted home
of Josephine. Or you may suggest the races--though I hope you won’t,
because in France the sport is secondary; and mannequins are a dull
race. I had rather you chose an excursion up the Seine, on one of the
fussy little river-boats; though of course at St. Cloud we should be
sure to find a blaring street fair in possession of the forest, and at
Meudon the same: the actors must bring their booths and flying pigs
into the very domain of Dame Nature herself; being no respecters of
congruity where passion for the theatric is concerned.
But we should have the cool vistas of the inner forest, and the stately
satisfaction of historic stone stairs and mellow creamy-grey urns
and statues through the trees; or we can go down the river instead
to old Vincennes, and have a look at the grim prison-castle that
has sheltered many a noble in disgrace. Which shall it be? To use
Madame La France’s borrowed Spanish expression: I am “_tout à votre
disposition_.”
III
AND ITS SEQUEL
Whichever it is, we must be back in time for tea at one of the
fashionable “_fiv’ o’clocks_”; for, though many ladies who buy their
clothes in Paris do not know it, looking at _grandes dames_ is vastly
different from looking at mannequins or the demi-monde; and the French
_grande dame_ is at her best at the tea hour. Someone has said, with
truth, that the American woman is the best-dressed in the morning,
the Englishwoman the best-dressed at night; but that the Parisienne
triumphs over both in the gracious, clinging gown of afternoon.
Let us turn into this exclusive little establishment in the Place
Vendôme, and from the vantage of a window-table in the mezzanine
observe the lovely ladies as they enter. The first to come is in the
simplest frock of leaf-green--the average American woman would declare
it “positively _plain_”; there is not a sign of lace or hand embroidery
about it, only at the open throat a soft fall of finest net, snowy as
few American women would take pains to have it. And the lady’s hair is
warm copper, and her hat a mere ingenious twist of leaf-green tulle;
but a master hand has draped it and the simple frock of green; and the
whole is a beautiful blend of line and colour, as unstudied as a bit of
autumn woodland.
Here is a combination more striking. The lady just stepping from the
pansy limousine has chosen yellow for her costume of shimmering crêpe;
a rich dull ochre, with a hint of red in its flowing folds. At the neck
and wrists are bits of fragile old embroidery, yellow too with age,
and that melt into the flesh-tones of the wearer till they seem part
of her living self; while at the slim waist-line is a narrow band of
dusky rose--the kind of rose that looks faintly coated with silver--and
daringly caught up high at the right side, a single mauve petunia. The
hat of course is black--a mere nothing of a tiny toque, with one spray
of filmy feather low against the lady’s blond hair.
“But she is not pretty at all,” you realize suddenly; “she’s really
almost ugly, and yet--”
Exactly. A Frenchwoman can be as ugly as it pleases perverse Heaven
to make her; there is always the “and yet” of her overwhelming charm.
You may call it artificial if you like--the mere material allurements
of stuffs and bits of thread; but to arrange those stuffs there must
be a fine discrimination, to know how to use those bits of thread, a
subtle science no other woman has--or ever quite acquires. Look about
you in the tea-room--now fast filling with women of all ages and all
tastes--what is it that forms their great general attraction? White
hands, shown to perfection by a fall of delicate lace, or the gleam of
a single big emerald or sapphire; hands moving daintily among fragile
china, the sheen of silver, the transparency of glass. And above the
hands, _vif_ faces, set in the soft coquetry of snowy ruches, graceful
fichus, piquant Medici collars, but all open upon the alluring V of
creamy throat.
What is it these women have? You can set down what they have on, but
what is it you cannot set down, yet that you know they possess? It is
the art of supreme femininity, carried out in the emphasis of every
charm femininity has; by means of contrast, colour, above all by the
subtlest means in everything: simplicity. And there is added to their
conscious art a pervading delicate voluptuousness, that underlies the
every expression of themselves as women; and that completes the havoc
of the male they subjugate.
Look at him now. Do you know any man but an Englishman who _likes_ tea?
Yet here they are, these absinthe-ridden Frenchmen drinking it with a
fervour; but their eyes are not within their cups! For again the highly
proper little dogs are present--“dogs for the afternoon,” of course;
and the management has been thoughtful in providing discreet corners
and deep window-seats, where a tête-a-tête may be enjoyed without too
many interruptions on the part of the _chic_ waitress with a windward
eye to tips.
Another precaution these abandoned couples take is a third
person--usually a young girl--to be with them. Madame starts out with
the young girl, by chance they meet Monsieur X at the five-o’clock,
and have tea with him; of course he escorts the ladies home, and
equally of course the young girl is “dropped” first. If between her
house and that of Madame’s, the better part of an hour is employed
in threading the tangled traffic of that time of evening, who can
say a word except the chauffeur--who is given no reason to regret
his long-suffering silence on such subjects. Thus during the hour
after tea, the hour between six and seven, when kindly dusk lends her
cloak to the game, husbands and wives play at their eternal trick of
outwitting one another.
It may be a game that disgusts you, you may find it sordid, even
repellent, to watch; but, among people with whom the marriage of
convenience is universal (and in most respects turns out excellently
well), what can you expect? A lover or a divorce, for both parties; and
the French man and woman prefer to maintain the stability of house and
name, and to wink at one another’s individual peccadilloes. They are
generally very good friends, and devoted to their children; and never,
never do they commit that crassness of the Anglo-Saxon, in bringing
their amours within the home.
[Illustration: L’HEURE DU RENDEZ-VOUS. RUE DE LA PAIX]
So let us watch the departing couples whirl away from the little
tea-room, without too great severity; and ourselves wander out into
the Place, and up the short, spectacular Rue de la Paix. This above
all others is the hour to see it--when fashion throngs the narrow
pavements, or bowls slowly past in open motor cars; and when the courts
of the great dressmaker’s shops are filled with young blades, waiting
for the mannequins to come down. One by one these marvellously slim,
marvellously apparelled young persons appear; each choosing the most
effective moment she can contrive for her particular entrance into
the twilight of the street. A silken hum of skirts precedes her; the
swains in the doorway eagerly look up--adjust their scarf-pins, give a
jauntier tilt to their top-hats--and the apparition, sweetly smiling
and emphatically perfumed, is among them.
There are murmured greetings, a suggestion from two of the bolder of
the beaux, a gracious assent from the lady; and the three spin away
in a taxi, to Armenonville or Château Madrid, for dinner. They have a
very pleasant life, these mannequins; for lending the figure the _bon
Dieu_ gave them--or that they painstakingly have acquired--they receive
excellent salaries from the great _couturiers_. In consideration of
which they appear at the establishment when they please, or not at all,
when they have the caprice to stay away. If the figure is sufficiently
remarkable, there is no limit to the whims they can enjoy--and be
pardoned, even eagerly implored to return to their deserted posts.
And then, as we see, after professional hours--what pleasaunce of
opportunity! What boundless possibilities of _la vie chic_! Really,
saith the ex-midinette complacently, it is good to have become a
mannequin.
Some there are who at this excellent business-hour of evening, make a
preoccupied exit; sweep past the disappointed gentlemen in waiting,
and walk swiftly towards the maze and glitter of the Boulevard. The
gentlemen shrug, comprehending. A _rendez-vous_. Out of idle curiosity,
one of them may follow. “_Mais, ma chère!_” he murmurs reproachfully,
at sight of the ill-restored antiquity the lady annexes at the corner.
She makes a deprecatory little face, over her shoulder, which says,
“You ought to understand, one must be practical. But what about
tomorrow night?” And a bit of paste-board flutters from her gold purse
and at the feet of the reproachful gentleman; who smiles, picks it
up, reads it, shrugs, and strolls back to his doorway, to find other
extravagance for this evening.
What a Paris! you exclaim; is there anything in it besides the
_rendez-vous_? Not at this hour. For mechanics and midinettes,
bank-clerks and _vendeuses_, shop-keepers and ever-thrifty daughters of
joy, pour into the boulevards in a human flood; and always, following
Biblical example, they go two by two. In another hour they will be
before their _croute-au-pot_, in one of these omnipresent cafés;
for the present they anxiously wait on corners, or, with a relieved
smile, link arms and move off at an absorbed, lingering gait down the
boulevard.
Some halt, to sit down at the little tables on the side-walk, and drink
an _apéritif_. Here too, the old dogs of commerce and industry get
together over a _Pernod_ or a _Dubonnet_, and in groups of twos and
threes heatedly thrash out the unheard-of fluctuations of the Bourse
today. The _bon bourgeois_ meets his wife, and hears of the children’s
cleverness, the servant’s perfidy, over a _sirop_; two anæmic young
government clerks gulp Amer Picon, and violently contradict one another
about the situation in Morocco; a well-known _danseuse_ sips vermouth
with the long-haired youth who directs the orchestra at the Folies
Bergères: it is as though, between six and seven, all Paris is strung
along outside the cafés that link the boulevard into a chain of chairs
and tables. And in the street, down the middle, motor-buses honk their
horns, horse-buses crack their whips, cochers and chauffeurs shout
anathema to one another and malediction on policemen and the human worm
in general; while the traffic thickens and crawls slower with every
minute, and a few helpless _gendarmes_ struggle in vain to preserve
order.
Let us out of it all, and to dine. We can go to Château Madrid, and eat
under the trees, and watch the gorgeous Parisiennes in the gallery as
instinctively they group themselves to lend heightened effect to the
_ensemble_; or we can go to Paillard’s and pay ten dollars apiece for
the privilege of sitting against the wall and consuming such sauces
as never were in Olympus or the earth beneath; or we can dine above
the gardens of the _Ambassadeurs_, in the elegant little balcony that
overhangs a miniature stage, and later look on at the _revue_. Or we
can sail up the river in the balmy gloaming, and eat a _friture_ of
smelts on the terrasse of the _Pêche Miraculeuse_--there are a score
of places where we can find a delicious meal, and in each observe a
different world; running from _do_ to _do_ in the scale of the race.
I suggest, however, that we choose a café in the Quarter--not one
of the tiny eating-houses like Henriette’s where we lunched, but a
full-fledged, prosperous café; frequented by the better-off artists
and the upper-class Quarter grisettes. Ten minutes in the Underground
lands us at the door of one of the best-known of these places. In the
front room, with big windows open to the street, is the _café des
consommateurs_; in the rear, the restaurant and card rooms, and a
delightful galleried garden, where also one may dine. Alluring strains
of Hoffmann’s _Barcarolle_ entice us thither with all speed; and soon
our enthusiasm is divided between chilled slices of golden melon and
the caressing sensuousness of the _maître d’orchestre’s_ violin.
In passing, one may note that good music in Paris is a rare quantity.
Though many people come to study singing, there are few vocal concerts,
and the _Touche_ and the _Rouge_ are the only orchestras of any
importance. They give weekly concerts in small halls, hardly bigger
than an ordinary-sized room, and the handful of attendants smoke their
fat porcelain pipes and extract cherries out of glasses of _kirsch_,
and happily imagine themselves music-lovers. But the great _artiste_ is
an artist through sight rather than through sound; and even in opera,
where the dramatic element is or should be subservient to the music,
the superdramatic French are ill-at-ease and hampered. Some of the
performances at the Opéra Comique are delightful, for here the lighter
pieces of Massenet and Debussy are given, with the French lilt and
dash peculiar to these masters. But, at the Opéra itself, the Wagnerian
compositions are poorly conducted, the audience uninterested and
uninteresting; and even the beautiful foyer--which, since the famous
New Year’s Eve balls have been done away with, knows no longer its
former splendours--cannot compensate for the thoroughly dull evening
one endures there.
Far happier is one listening to the serenades and intermezzos of the
cherubic Alsatian violinist at the Quarter café-restaurant. And,
after dinner, he plays solos out in the café proper, for the same
absorbed polyglot audience that has listened to him for years. Let
us range ourselves in this corner against the wall, between the two
American lady artists of masculine tailoring and Kansas voices, and the
fierce-mustachioed Czek, mildly amused over a copy of the _Rire_. Every
seat in the big double room is taken now, and we are a varied crew of
French _bourgeois_, Russian, Norwegian, and German students, English
and American tourists, Japanese attachés (or so one supposes from
their conversation, in excellent French, with our neighbour Czek), and
blond and black bearded artists who might be of any nation except the
Oriental.
They all know each other, and are exchanging jokes and cigarettes
over their _café crême_--which they drink, by the way, out of glass
tumblers--and paying goodnaturedly for a _bock_ for Suzanne or
Madeleine, whose _bocks_ some other person should be paying. The room
has taken on the look of a big family party, some talking, some
writing letters, others reading from the shiny black-covered comic
papers; all smoking, and sipping absently now and then from their
steaming glasses or little _verres de liqueur_. The music drifts in
soothingly, between spurts of conversation, and one is conscious of
utter contentment and well-being.
Suddenly a door is flung open. In whirls a small hurricane, confined
within a royal purple coat and skirt; gives one lightning glance round
the circle of surprised merry-makers, and with a triumphant cry pounces
on Suzanne yonder, with the fury of a young virago. “So!” pants the
vixen, shaking poor Suzanne. “So you thought to outwit me, you thought
to oust me, did you? _Me_, whom he knew six months before ever he saw
you--me whom he took to Havre, to Fontainebleau, to--to--traitress!
Coward! _Scélérate!_ Take that--and that--and that!”
She slaps Suzanne soundly on both cheeks; Suzanne pulls her hat
off--each makes a lunge at the other’s hair. “_Mesdames, mesdames_,”
cries the _patron_, hurrying forward. “_Je vous en prie_--and
monsieur,” reproachfully, “can you do nothing?”
Monsieur--the monsieur who kindly, and quite disinterestedly, paid
Suzanne’s book--sits by, lazily tapping his fingers against the glass.
“What would you?” he says, with a shrug. “Women--” another shrug--“one
had as well let them finish it.”
But the _patron_ is by no means of this mind. He begins telling those
ladies that his house is a serious house; that his clients are of the
most serious, that he himself absolutely demands and insists upon
seriousness; and that if these ladies cannot tranquillize themselves
instantly----
But of a sudden he halts--pulled up short by the abrupt halt of
the ladies themselves. In the thick of the fray Suzanne has flung
contemptuous explanation; Gaby, the virago, has caught it. A truce
is declared. Curt conversation takes place. Monsieur, still lazily
tapping, consents to confirm the defendant’s statement as fact. Gaby,
though still suspicious, consents to restore the hated rival’s hat;
and in ten minutes the three are tranquilly discussing Cubism and a
new round of _demi-brunes_. The audience, who have gazed on the entire
comedy with keen but quite impartial interest, shrug their shoulders,
light fresh cigarettes, and return to their papers and pens. Since the
first start of surprise, there has not been a murmur among them; only
complete concentration on the drama, which the next minute they as
completely forget.
There are a dozen such scenes a day, in one’s wandering about Paris;
that is, a dozen scenes as sudden, as intense, and as quickly over.
The everyday life of the people is so vivid, of such swift and varied
contrast, that the theatre itself, to satisfy them, must overreach
into melodrama before it rouses. I believe that no other city in the
world, unless it be the next most dramatic, New York, could support a
theatre like the _Grand Guignol_ for example. I have seen there, in
one evening, gruesomely realistic representations of a plague scene in
India; the destruction of a submarine, with all the crew on board;
and the operating-room of a hospital, where a woman is unnecessarily
murdered to pay the surgeon’s wife’s hat bill.
The French imagination, turned loose on dramatic situations, is like
a cannibal before a peck of missionaries; only instead of eating ’em
alive, the Frenchman makes them live--and diabolically accurate. But
not for the doubtful interest of studying French psychology through
its horrors, shall we end our day by a visit to the _Guignol_. Nor
yet to the _Français_ or the _Odéon_, as we are a bit tired to follow
Molière or Racine tonight. What do you say to looking in at the
cheerful rowdyism of the _Moulin Rouge_, and then on for a bite at
one of the restaurants on “the Hill”? It would never do for you, as
a self-respecting American, to leave Paris without properly “doing”
Montmartre; and as for me, I want to prove to you my assertion that
Montmartre exists for and off visiting strangers like ourselves.
Let us make short work of the _Moulin_ therefore--which is neither
more nor less raw than the rest of the variétés prepared for foreign
consumption--and go on up to the Place Pigalle; to the racket and
ribaldry of the _Café Royal_. Other night-restaurants make some
pretense of silver-gilding their vulgarity; the _Abbaye_ and the _Rat
Mort_ have their diamond dust of luxury to throw into one’s eyes. But
the _Royal_ is unadulterated Montmartre: the girls, most of them,
shabby--their rouge put on without art; the harsh red coats of the
tziganes seemingly made of paper, and their songs lacking even the
thinnest veneer of French wit.
In the small low room upstairs fresh air is left behind by those who
enter. Instead, the heavy-scented powder of the dancing girls, the
sweet sickening perfume of great baskets of roses on sale, and the
pervading odour of lobster, combine to assail us as we steer through
the crowded room to a table. These last are arranged in the familiar
hollow square round the wall, leaving a cleared space in the centre for
dancers.
We order supper, and then look about us. It is still a different
world from the many we have seen today: a world of “wire-pulled
automatons,”, who laugh dead laughter, and sing dead tuneless songs, in
their clock-work dance of pleasure. There is a sinister host of these
puppet-people: girls of seventeen and eighteen, with the hard, settled
features of forty; Englishmen, very red and embarrassed, blatantly over
for a “larky weed-end”; next them a mere baby of fourteen, with sleek
curls to her shoulders, and a slazy blue frock to her knees--chattering
shrilly to the Polish Jew with the pasty white face, and the three
pasty-white necks rolling over his collar. Yonder, a group of
Brazilians, most of them very boys, who have captured the prettiest
_danseuse_ and carried her off for champagne; beyond them, torpid-eyed
Germans seeking shatzkinder, and American drummers by the dozen--their
feet on the bar-rail, their hats on the back of their heads, grinning
half sheepishly like nasty little boys on a forbidden holiday.
Well, does it amuse you--this “typical slice of French life,” as the
guidebooks label it? And what of the dances--but, rather than look at
them, let us talk to this girl who is passing. She seems different from
the rest, in her dark “tailor-made” and plain white shirt; among the
satin and tinsel of the other women, her costume and her white, almost
transparent face cry attention to themselves by very modesty. Perhaps
she will talk real talk; occasionally--when she finds she has nothing
to gain as marionette--one of them will.
We ask her to have some champagne. Nonchalantly she accepts, and sits
down. Is she new at the _Royal_? is the leading question. Oh no, she
has been coming here for nearly a year. But this gentleman is new
(quickly)? You reply, with a certain intonation, that you will always
be “new,”--that you will not come again. She sends you a searching
side-glance--and understands.
The preliminaries clearly disposed of, we get to the meat of things;
baldly and with no apology, now that we have thrown down our hand. What
is she doing here? Can’t she find a better place? Has she no family to
help her?
She smiles, flicks the ash from her cigarette. But yes, she has a
family: a blind mother, two little sisters, and a half-witted brother.
She is sole bread-winner for the lot. As for this place--a shrug,
laconic, unresentful, as she throws a glance round the murky room--it
is not _chic_, true it is second-rate; but the commissions are good,
and clothes here do not cost much, and-- “the simple fact,” says she,
gazing quietly over our shoulder into the glass, is, “that to work any
trade successfully, one must have the proper tools. I was young, or I
should have thought of that before I began.”
You gasp, under your breath. This French girl, when she draws aside
the curtain, draws it to reveal--with terrible sincerity--a thin white
face. She tells no tale of an attempt to live “honestly,” of pitiful
struggles as dressmaker, shop-girl, and the rest of the sentimental
dodges. She bares her tragedy simply as only a French person can; and
it is that she has not the proper tools!
You mumble something meant to be consoling, and shamefacedly slip a
louis under her plate. She accepts it with no trumped-up emotion, but a
frank “_merci!_” And evidently fearing to bore us, moves away with the
nonchalance characteristic of her type.
When she is gone, we are suddenly aware of wanting to leave. For,
among the grinning ghosts, reality has passed; touching with her grim
wand the puppets, to show them as naked souls--each with its uncovered
reason. So seen, they send a shudder through us: the baby-faced girl in
her blue frock, now sleepily batting kohl from her eyes in desperate
effort to remain amusing; the dancing-girls with their high nervous
laughter; the set, determined smiles of the better-dressed _cocottes_:
it is the artist playing in the meanest of all theatres, the artist
born without the “proper tools,” or who lost hers, but playing
stoically to the end.
And the tziganes are twanging deafening accompaniment on their guitars,
and shouting “Patita” at the top of their execrable voices; and smoke
and the thick smell of sauces and the scent of the women’s _sachet_
hangs in sickening haze through the place. Let us go--let us flee from
it! For this is not Paris; it is the harlot’s house: and that is the
loathsome property of the universe.
We rush from it out into the silent street--the air strikes sharp and
fresh upon our faces. For it rains, a pearly mist, and the thousand
lights make rainbows on the flat wet flags of paving. We hail a cab,
but leave the top open to the grateful dampish cool; and glide away
down the slippery hill into what looks like dawn.
But it is only other lights--mist-veiled, and gleaming more intimately
now; like the gems of a woman who has gone to her boudoir, but not yet
taken off her jewels. The woman calls, softly. Can you keep yourself
from answering? You may have your loyalty to faithful London, the
Comrade; you may burn your reverential candle before the mystic vestal,
Rome; or shout yourself hoarse before the triumph of New York, the
star: but can you resist the tugging, glowing, multiple allurement of
everyman’s One Woman, Paris?
Can you go back over this night when her jewels flashed for you into
the Seine, when the rich rumble of her voice called to you across the
bridges, when the cool, sweet smell and the throb and cling of her
were for you--_you_; and not thrill to her and yearn for her, as men in
spite of their inconstancy have thrilled and yearned and come back to
One out of all the rest, throughout the history of women?
I hope that you cannot. For, as you return again and again, the
“make-up” of the woman fades; the great artist lays aside the cautious
mask, steps down from the stage, and for you becomes that greatest of
all: a simple human being.
III
THE CHILDREN’S PERFORMANCE
(Vienna)
I
THE PLAYHOUSE
To see Vienna properly, one should be eighteen, and a young person of
good looks and discretion. Patsy was all this, and I, being Patsy’s
uncle, was allowed my first peep at the jolliest of cities through her
_lunettes de rose_. It was a bleak, grey morning in January--with the
mercury at several degrees below zero--when we rattled through the
quiet streets to our hotel.
“Ugh!” said Patsy, some three minutes after we had left the station,
“what a horrid dreary place!”
I suggested deprecatingly that places had a fashion of so appearing at
ten after seven in the morning.
“Yes, but look at those great, gloomy buildings and you know, Uncle
Peter, you always say that what people build betrays what they are.”
“Dear me, Patsy, do I say that?” It is alarming to be confronted with
one’s platitudes before breakfast!
“Yes (emphatically). Well, _I_ think that, if the Viennese are like
their architecture, they must be appallingly dull!” And Patsy wraps her
furs and an air of bitter disappointment round her, and subsides into
silence.
I am secretly apprehensive. To carry off a young lady of capricious
fancy and unquestionable loveliness, from the thick of the balls and
parties of her first season, under oath that she shall enjoy even
giddier gayety in the Austrian Carnival; and to behold her gravely
displeased with the very bricks and stones of the place--you will admit
the situation called for anxiety.
I did what I always do in such a case, and with such a young lady:
fed her--as delectable and extensive a breakfast as I could command;
and then sent for a young man. To be exact, I had taken this latter
precaution two or three days before, being not unacquainted with
Patsy’s psychology and predilections. The young man arrived--an
officer (it is always best to get an officer when one can) of no mean
proportions in his dashing blue uniform and smart helmet. I introduced
him to Patsy as the son of my friend Count H----, former minister to
the United States. Patsy smiled--as Patsy can, and gave him a dainty
three fingers. Captain Max clicked his heels together, bowed from his
magnificent waist, and kissed her hand with an impressive: “_Ich habe
die Ehre, gnädige fräulein!_” And we went to watch Guard Change in the
Burg.
It is fascinating enough in itself, this old courtyard with its many
gates, and weather-beaten walls surrounding the residence of the
Hapsburg princes; and when filled with the Emperor’s Guards, in their
grey and scarlet, and the rousing music of the royal band--to say
nothing of that fierce white-whiskered old presence in the window
above, surrounded by his brilliant gentlemen--I assure you it can
thrill the heart of even an uncle!
Nowhere as in this ancient stronghold, under the gaze of those stern,
shaggy-browed old eyes, does the tragic history of Austria so haunt
one. Admitting only the figures and episodes of the life of this
present Emperor, one is assailed by the memory of Elizabeth--his
Empress--and her shameful assassination at Geneva; the ghastly mystery
of the death of Crown Prince Rudolf, the one son of the ill-starred
royal pair; and the hardships and struggles of Maria Christina (the
Emperor’s sister) in Spain, and the terrible murder of his brother
Maximilian--sent forth in splendour to be Emperor of Mexico, but marked
for death from the first. One sees the desolate mad figure of his widow
shut within the wild beauty of Castle Mirmar, and wonders only how the
Emperor himself can have escaped her fate. Bereft of his beautiful
wife, the son he idolized, the brother he himself unknowingly sent to
his destruction, Francis Joseph of Austria is at once the most solitary
and indomitable personality among the rulers of the world today. Never,
through all his misfortunes, has his iron pride given way to complaint
or regret; and never has he confessed himself beaten.
At the age of eighty-four, he still sits erect in his saddle, and
commands with characteristic imperious fire. The people sometimes laugh
at his eccentricities, and are impatient of his old-fashioned ideas
on certain things, but the tone in which they pronounce his title,
“_Unser Kaiser_,” conveys their acceptance of his divine right as the
pivot of their universe. In the recent war of the Balkan Allies, when
the progressive Austrian party under Archduke Ferdinand clamoured
against the conservative policy of the crown, the great mass of the
people stood loyally by the Emperor--and so perhaps were saved the
horrors and draining expense of a war of their own.
Austria is always in a ferment of one kind or another, composite as
she is of half a dozen distinct and antagonistic strains of blood
that have yet to be really amalgamated; but her Grand Old Man does
his best to keep peace between his Slavs and Hungarians, Bohemians
and Poles--and generally succeeds. He loves the pomp attached to his
imperial prerogative, and is never so happy as when the centre of some
elaborate ceremonial in one of his kingdoms. It tickles his vanity
always to have extravagant precautions taken for his safety; and on the
days when he drives to Schönbrunn (his favourite country residence)
two plain clothes men and two uniformed guards are stationed at every
block of the entire way from the Burg to the palace. Punctuality is
another of his strong points; he departs or arrives on the dot of the
hour appointed, and demands the same exactness of the officials and
detectives along the road.
With all his dignity, he is an old person with a temper, and an
obstinacy hard to subdue. During one of his recent illnesses he
absolutely refused to be shaved; also, what was more important, to eat.
The entire palace was in despair, when Mademoiselle Z---- arrived one
afternoon on her daily visit. She is a homely lady (formerly a great
actress) of almost as many years as the Emperor, and comes every day
to play chess with him. When she heard of his stubborness on this
particular occasion, she marched into the imperial presence with a bowl
of soup and some biscuits, and called out: “Come, Franz Joseph, don’t
be a fool! Sit up and eat.”
The Emperor gave her one furious look--and obeyed; afterwards meekly
suffering himself to be shaved and put in proper order as an invalid.
He and the doughty old _artiste_ have been close friends for forty
years, and he is fond of remarking that there is one woman in the world
who makes up in brains what she lacks in features. I should like to see
the two shrewd old heads over their chess.
Instead, I must remember my responsibilities, and come back to Patsy
and her _hauptmann_. He is bending towards her solicitously; suggesting
a walk in the Garden, a cup of chocolate at Demel’s, the concert at the
Volksgarten after lunch, perhaps in the evening some skating at his
club? Patsy finds time to whisper to me that she thinks the Viennese
not _too_ dull, after all. She hears they even have balls--masked
balls, in fancy dress, on the ice. Doesn’t Uncle Peter think waltzing
on ice sounds rather nice?
Uncle Peter, who has rheumatism, feebly agrees that it does _sound_
very nice; and falls into his proper background as chaperone, while
the young people dart ahead down the narrow street to the Garden.
Here, in the fashionable short promenade, an exhilarating sense of
prosperity fills the air. There is the soft elegance of furs, the
scent of violets, the occasional gleam of scarlet lining an officer’s
picturesque white cloak; brilliant shops draw their knots of pretty
women to the windows, well set-up men stroll by in long fur coats
or drive their own superb horses to and fro: all is easy, gay and
care-free, betokening an idle happiness.
“And there are no beggars,” sighs Patsy contentedly, “I _am_ glad of
that!”
It is true--and rather extraordinary for a city of almost two million
inhabitants; but, on the surface at least, there seem to be no actually
poor people in Vienna. The more one knows the place the more one is
impressed with the fact that, while the upper classes are extravagant
and show-loving, the lower seem to have imbibed a spirit of cheerful
thrift which keeps them from real poverty. They have enough to eat
and to wear, and for an occasional bit of pleasure; what more, their
good-humoured faces seem to ask, could they want?
Only the very wealthy Viennese can afford a house to himself. The great
majority of people rent a story, or half a story, of the huge residence
buildings that give the city its monotonously gloomy look. Row after
row of these line the streets, all the same height and the same style;
but in no way do they resemble the typical “apartments” of England,
America or France. Each dwelling in itself is the size of a house of
moderate dimensions, with its own inner stairways and separate floors.
There are certain conveniences in the arrangement, but I cannot say I
find it on the whole satisfactory. One has constantly the feeling of
having strayed into a public building to eat and sleep; which causes
one to do both under a depressing sense of apology.
The people unconsciously admit this lack of home attraction by their
incessant attendance at cafés. While the Frenchman or the Spaniard
spends an hour a day in his favourite café, chatting with friends, the
Viennese spends an entire morning, afternoon or evening--or all three.
Coffee or chocolate with whipped cream (the famous _Wiener Mélange_) is
the usual drink with which he pays for his seat, and the illustrated
papers that are his obsession. He, or Madame his friend, will remain
in a comfortable corner of the window hour after hour, reading and
smoking, smoking and reading; only looking up to sip chocolate, or to
stare at some newcomer. The café, also the constant cigarette-smoking,
is as much a habit with the women of Vienna as with the men. And one
is not surprised to hear that there are over six hundred of these
(literally) “coffee-houses” in the city, and that all of them are
continually full.
Some of the larger establishments provide excellent music--and here
we are fingering the edges of Viennese character and culture: next to
(or along with) love of gayety go a love and understanding of music,
that amounts almost to a passion. Besides the café concerts, there are
military concerts, philharmonic concerts and symphony concerts; to
say nothing of the host of notable recitals crowding one another for
attention.
One is struck by the enormous and enthusiastic patronage given to
these affairs, each and all. In Anglo-Saxon countries the ventures of
a concert-manager are at best precarious, and, in spite of the high
price of tickets, frequently result in a dead loss. An Anglo-Saxon
audience is tepid, for both music and drama, being roused to fervour
not by either art in itself, but only by a great name made actual upon
the stage. In Germany music is a religion; in Vienna there is added
a fire and dash which make it no less pure, while more seductive.
From _operette_ to _concerto_, the Viennese run the gamut of musical
expression, in every phase pre-eminent.
Nor have they an ounce of the artistic snobbishness made fashionable by
peoples with whom music is an acquired taste rather than an instinct.
They are as frank in enjoyment of “The Merry Widow” as of a Strauss
recital with the master conducting; because they regard each as a high
art unto itself. There is no aristocracy of music, and so there is no
commercialism to degrade it. One may hear grand opera from an excellent
seat for fifty cents; or the Philharmonic Orchestra, with Weingartner
conducting, for the same price. The secret of the whole system is that
to the Viennese good music is not a luxury, but food and drink and
essential to life; and therefore to be had by everyone.
Concert audiences are attentive to a degree, and during the performance
the slightest disturbing sound is sternly hissed. This is true even in
the public parks where the people listen in crowds to the fine military
bands that play every day. While at the Volksgarten (frequented by the
middle classes and by nobility as well) Patsy was crushed on her first
afternoon by the stertorous rebuke of a _wienerische_ dowager, because
the child removed her gloves during the overture!
“Disagreeable old thing,” grumbled Patsy, when it was finished,
“doesn’t she know I can’t hear with my gloves on?”
Captain Max, in a tumult of perturbation over the episode, solemnly
suggested that he convey this unhappy fact to the good lady. But
Patsy’s naughty mouth was twitching at the corners, and she said she
had rather he ordered chocolate. She has a conscience somewhere, has
Patsy; in spite of being a pretty woman.
We drank our delicious brew of _Mélange_ between Beethoven and Bach,
and had another after the Schumann Symphony--being seated like everyone
else at one of the little tables that fill the Volksgarten. This is
under cover in winter, and three times a week indoor classical concerts
are held, under the direction of the leading conductors. Ladies bring
their crochet, young girls their gallants; and during the intermissions
it is a lively scene, when tables are pushed together, waiters hurry
to and fro with the creamy chocolate, or big frothing _seidels_ of
Münchener, and conversation and good cheer hum all round.
Let the orchestra reappear, however, and there is silence--so prompt
as to be almost comical. Sentences are left unfinished, chairs are
hastily and noiselessly shoved back, and the buzzing crowd of two
minutes ago is still as a pin; alert for the first note of music.
The tickets for these symphonious feasts cost thirty cents, but the
audience could not show more devoted attention (or get finer return) if
they had paid five dollars.
Here, as everywhere in Vienna, one is impressed with the good looks
and attractiveness of the people in general. In their careful grooming
and prevailing air of prosperity, they bear a distinct resemblance
to Americans; and one may go deeper under the surface and find a
reason for this in the highly complex mixture of race in both nations.
There is the same tall, rather aggressive build among the men; the
same piquant features, bright hair and pretty colouring among the
women of the two countries. And, to go further, there is the same
supreme fondness for dress and outward show, that results in reckless
extravagance.
With the Viennese, however, this trait is not subjective--i. e., to
create a personal impression--but simply part and parcel of the central
aim of their existence: to have a good time, and enjoy life to the
fullest. They are by no means a people with a purpose, like Americans;
they have neither the desire, nor the shrewdness, nor the ambition to
make something remarkable of themselves. Rather do they frolic through
life like thoughtless children; laughing, crying, falling down and
picking themselves up--only to fall again; but always good-natured,
kindly and gay, with a happy-go-lucky cheerfulness that is very
appealing as well as contagious whilst one is among them.
There is none of the studied courtesy of the Parisian, nor yet his
studied elegance; but a bright spontaneity both in outward effect
and natural manner, which shows itself in many captivating little
customs of everyday. Take for instance the pretty fashion of kissing a
lady’s hand: in France this is confined to occasions of ceremony, and
so creates at once an atmosphere of the formal; in Vienna it is the
ordinary expression of joyous welcome, so that even the shop-keepers,
on the entrance of a lady customer, exclaim: “_Kuss die Hand, gnädige
Frau!_” While to a gentleman they declare: “I have the honour (to greet
you) _meinherr_!”
Everyone is anxious to please, and quick to help the stranger in his
struggles with language. As in Bavaria, the German spoken is softened
of its original starchiness; so that _mädchen_ becomes _mädl_,
_bischen bissell_, etc. Strict Hanoverians scorn such vandalism, but
in the mouth of the gentler-tongued Southerners it is very pretty.
The “low dialect” of the people, that is, the typical _wienerisch_,
is an appalling jargon quite incomprehensible to the foreigner. But
kindliness, the language spoken by one and all of the warm-hearted
Viennese, is everywhere recognized and appreciated.
Patsy assures me that, even in their impertinences, the young blades
of the town are never crass; but show, rather, a lively humour and
child-like interest in the lady of their admiration. I well remember
that first evening, after the _hauptmann_ had left us, when my niece
told me seriously that she was convinced of the grave libel cast on
Austrians as a whole and Austrian officers in particular.
“You know, Uncle Peter,” says she, swinging to my arm, as we enter our
hotel, “they say they are horrid and dissipated, and will take the
first opportunity to say shocking things to a girl. But _I_ think they
are far too clever for that, besides too fine. I am sure they know what
one is, the minute they look at one; and behave accordingly. Don’t
you,” adds Patsy anxiously, “think so too, Uncle Peter?”
“Perhaps, perhaps,” I return dubiously, “but there’s their
architecture, you know. You can’t get round that. What people build--”
A slim hand is clapped over my mouth. And, “you are to remember
please,” says Patsy severely, “we are talking now not of architects but
of officers.”
It was true. And, singularly, we have been talking of them a good deal
ever since.
II
THE PLAYERS WHO NEVER GROW OLD
Not many days after our establishment in the Carnival City, Patsy had
her first experience with the smart “masher” and his unique little
game. I being by no means bred to chaperoning, and in all respects,
besides, immorally modern, allowed the young lady to go round the
corner to a sweet-shop unaccompanied. She came back with a high colour
instead of caramels, and--no, there is no way of softening it--she was
giggling.
Patsy never giggles unless something scandalous has happened. “What’s
the matter?” I asked, instantly alarmed.
She tumbled into a chair, laughing helplessly. “The--the funniest
thing,” she began, gasping.
“A man, I suppose?”
Patsy stopped laughing, and regarded me admiringly. “What an analyst
you are, Uncle Peter! Yes, of course a man; but--”
“Did he follow you--did he speak to you?” I may be modern, but I had
one eye on my hat and overcoat.
Patsy giggled again. “No--oh no, Uncle Peter. He didn’t follow me,
he _went ahead_ of me; and, when I reached the corner, there he was
standing, hat in hand, with the most injured air--as though our
appointment was for half past two and I had kept him waiting quite an
hour! His expression was perfectly heavenly--plaintive resignation just
giving way to radiant delight--I can’t think how he managed it on such
short notice. Probably by extensive practice before the glass.
“Anyhow, there was one moment of awful apprehension for him, just as I
came up; and then--the most crestfallen disappointment you can imagine.
He had arranged everything so considerately and subtly for me, and I,
all unconscious of him, passed on! I didn’t dare look back, but out of
the tail of my eye I could see his chagrin as I disappeared--into the
side entrance of the hotel. All that art gone for nothing I suppose he
thought; and to be begun over again at the next corner,” added Patsy,
who is a young woman of rather terrible discernment, at times.
“But it is nice of them not to speak, isn’t it?” she said. “It shows
how really clever they are. No Englishman or Frenchman of the same
er--proclivities would have been as subtle.”
Nor as dangerous, thinks Uncle Peter to himself, with a promise to curb
his modernity for the future. It is all very amusing, this manœuvre of
the flirtatious Viennese male; and, since Patsy’s encounter, I have
seen it so many times as to know it to be typical; but in its very
refinement lies its evil. If the Austrian, even in his vices, were not
so free from crudity--so transparently naïve, his attraction would be
halved--if not lost entirely. But Patsy was right in her surmise that
he can place a woman at a glance; and if he ventures to lead her a bit
further than her looks suggest, and than he afterwards finds possible,
he is quick to realize his mistake and if he can to make reparation.
As a student, like his German cousin, he lives in frank unmorality.
There are thousands of students in Vienna--students at the
universities, medical students, music students--each with his
_schatzkind_, who often shares his studies as well as his garret. This
thoroughly cosmopolitan set of young people plays a distinct part in
the free and easy jollity of the city as a whole. You see them in the
streets and cafés, in the topmost gallery at the Opera, and forming
enthusiastic groups at all concerts; their shabby velveteens a nice
contrast with their vivid, impressionable faces.
During Carnival they are natural leaders in the routs and festivities;
this entire season is for them one rollicking fancy-dress ball. They
may go hungry, but they can always arrange a new and clever costume;
and one meets them coming home arm-in-arm through the dusk, carrying
bulky parcels and humming the waltz from the latest operette. They
smile at everybody, and everybody smiles back, and unconsciously
starts humming too. Patsy says there is something about dusk, and big
packages, and soft-falling snow that makes one hum. I feared from the
first that this was a demoralizing atmosphere for Patsy.
It would have been different if we hadn’t known people. But we did
know people--a delightful handful, eager to lavish their boundless
hospitality on the _wunderschönes mädl_. And then there was Captain
Max, whose marvellous uniforms and crisp black moustache soon became
as familiar to our hotel as the bow of the head waiter. Two or three
days after our arrival, Captain Max and his mother took Patsy to her
first Viennese ball. I stayed at home to nurse my rheumatism, which
the freezing temperature and constant snow had not improved. But I was
waiting by our sitting-room fire to “hear all about it,” when Patsy
returned at half past three--her arms full of roses, her auburn head
less strictly coiffed than when she sallied forth.
“Oh, Uncle Peter!” She kissed me at her favourite angle somewhere
behind the ear, and sank into a cushion with her chiffons like a flower
into its petals.
“Well, well, did you amuse yourself? The Countess wasn’t difficult?”
“She was a duck! (I should no more think of apologizing for Patsy’s
English than for her _retroussé_ nose. Both, as my French friend says,
intrigue me infinitely.) She danced harder than anyone, and _lieber
Himmel_,” says Patsy with a gusty sigh, “how they do dance! But I’ll
begin at the beginning and tell you everything.
“Of course you know it was this club Captain Max belongs to, and that
they dance every month in the ball-rooms of the different hotels.
There are only thirty or forty members in the club, so it’s nice and
small--not one of those herd affairs. Most of the people had arrived
before us, and were sitting in the galleries round the ball-room; and
before ever the dancing began, Uncle Peter, they all were eating and
drinking things. The galleries are raised by just a few steps from the
floor of the room itself, and there are lots of tables where continuous
supper goes on--really, one is expected to eat _something_ between
every two dances.
“Fancy, Uncle Peter, one is busily dissecting a quail when one’s
partner appears; one finishes the waltz, and returns to take another
bite, only to be interrupted again, and carried off. It is provoking!
But the tables are convenient as an anchor to steer for and much more
fun for the chaperones, I should think, than those dreary chairs
against the wall, at home.
“I haven’t told you the appalling ordeal of actually arriving, however.
Every girl with her escort, must walk the length of the ball-room
_alone_, while the lucky ones who are already settled in the gallery
pass judgment on one’s frock, coiffure and all the rest. Captain
Max hadn’t warned me, and when I found myself under that battery of
lorgnettes and monocles I was petrified. I knew that my train was a
fright, and every pin in my hair about to fall; but somehow I got
across that terrible expanse of slippery floor, and to our table.
“The Countess’s sister was there--the one who called on Sunday you
know--and her son and daughter, such a pretty girl, Uncle Peter! Black
hair and creamy skin--of course the whole family shows the Hungarian
strain--and a delicious frock just to her ankles. It seems all the
young girls here wear short dresses for dancing, and so they don’t
have that draggled look we get with our trains. Everyone at the table,
including the women, rose during introductions; and of course all the
men kissed one’s hand. Then they brought dozens of other men. Captain
Max says there are always three times as many as there are girls at
these dances--and I met such a lot that for the rest of the evening I
had no idea whom I knew and whom I didn’t.
“We began to dance directly, and oh, my dear, the Vienna waltz! I’ve
seen it on the stage, and it looked easy--just standing in one spot
and whirling round; but when one actually attempted it--! At first I
was so dizzy, I could only hold up my train and keep my feet going. I
know now all the sensations of a top when it’s spun at full speed, and
never allowed to die down. But, after a while, I regained sufficient
consciousness to catch the little step they take on the second step,
and then it was easier. There’s a sort of swing to it, too, that’s
rather fascinating; and Captain Max does do it well.”
Patsy, on her cushion, gazed into the fire--then at the roses in her
lap. “Ahem!” I coughed, as an uncle will when the clock points to four
of the dawn. “You were saying?”
“Oh!--yes. Well, the music of course was heavenly; one could have
danced to it all night, as most of them do here. The Frau Gräfin said
hardly anyone goes home before six in the morning, and some at eight!
That is why the Viennese laugh at their own custom of paying the porter
twenty _hellers_ for opening the door after half past ten; they all
come home in the morning, after the house is unlocked again!
“But I couldn’t have kept it up any longer, Uncle Peter. In the first
place you are never allowed to sit out a dance, not even part of one.
The minute you drop into a chair out of sheer weariness, some one comes
and clicks his heels together, bows profoundly, and off you have to go
with him. Then they have a habit of breaking in, that is convenient at
times, and annoying at others. All the men who have no partners stand
in the middle of the room, and when you have had a round or two with
one person, another very courteously but firmly stops you and claims
his turn. In this way, each dance is divided between four or five men.
It’s all very well when you don’t like your partner of the moment,
but--”
Patsy again was looking at her yellow roses. “There are disadvantages?”
I suggested.
“Yes. Oh, several kinds of disadvantages, Uncle Peter. Most of my
dances were silent as the grave. I would say, ‘you speak English?’ My
partner would reply, ‘alas, fräulein, a few words only. But you, surely
you speak German?’ ‘Unfortunately, not at all.’ Then dead silence. But
they are all kindness in trying to understand, and everyone wants to
learn our way of waltzing--‘_so langsam_,’ they say wonderingly. When
Captain Max and I tried it, so that I might get a little rest, all the
others stopped dancing and watched the performance. Then every man I
met wanted me to teach him--they are just like children over something
new.
“Poor Uncle Peter, you’re yawning. Only let me tell you about the other
dances, and then you can go to bed. There were two quadrilles, not the
old-fashioned kind, but quite like cotillon figures--really charming.
They showed the pretty costumes of the girls and the uniforms of the
officers to much better advantage than the round dances do. Then there
was a terrible thing called the _Polka Schnell_--faster even than the
regular waltz, and that makes one giddy to watch. But the Countess and
all the chaperones threw themselves into it as madly as the younger
ones, and weren’t in the least out of breath at the end. I believe
Viennese women never grow old. They seem to have as good a time at
sixty as at sixteen, and to be as popular.
“After the second quadrille, we had ‘supper’--though we’d been eating,
as I told you, all evening. But now we sat down formally to chicken and
salad, cakes of all sorts and cheese and beer. It was a funny supper,
wasn’t it, Uncle Peter? I suppose they’d sniff at our champagne and
ices; they like a substantial meal. The dance immediately after supper
is Ladies’ Choice, and it’s amusing to watch the frantic efforts of
each man to engage the favour of his particular divinity. They lean
against a pillar and stare into one’s eyes with the most despairing
gaze, looking anxiously meanwhile to see if one holds their bouquet. I
forgot to tell you the pretty custom they have of bringing one roses
and violets all during the evening. The men have great baskets of
flowers in their dressing-room, and hurry to and fro with posies for
the ladies they admire. By the time you are ready to go home, you have
quite an imposing collection.”
“All of one colour, it seems,” I observed innocently, as Patsy herself
stifled a yawn, and rose regretfully from her cushioned nest.
“Oh,” said Patsy with immoderate indifference, “they’re all in my
room--the violets and everything. These”--looking down at Captain Max’s
roses--“I must have forgotten these!” she decides with a brilliant
smile. “Goodnight, Uncle Peter--you’re rather a dear.”
That settled it; as any properly trained uncle would have known. When
a healthy young woman begins to call her moth-eaten male relatives by
endearing names, it is time to lock the stable door--or at least to
realize one’s temerity in having opened it in the first place. But,
as Patsy’s mother, from her severe infancy, has told me, I am most
improperly trained; so I hastened to accept an invitation from Countess
H----, bidding my niece and me to a skating party at her son’s rink
next evening.
Every true Viennese has his private rink membership, as he has his
other clubs, and is an expert skater. All afternoon and evening the
various skating resorts are crowded with devotees of the graceful
sport; which is held, by the way, out of doors--the large rinks
being simply walled in from the street. Captain Max’s is of quite
imposing proportions, a very different affair from the cramped, stuffy
“ice-palace” of Paris or London. There is a building, to be sure, but
this is merely for the _garde-robe_ and the inevitable refreshment
rooms. The skating takes place on the vast field of ice outside.
At night this is brilliantly illuminated with parti-coloured lights,
and the scene during Carnival--when the skaters are frequently in
fancy-dress--is fascinating beyond description. As I first saw it,
gipsies were gliding over the ice with pierrots, geisha girls with
pierrettes; Arabs in the ghostly burnous swept past with Indians,
painted and feathered, and a whole regiment of Rough Riders swooped
down upon them, with blood-thirsty yells. A wonderful polar bear (under
his skin a lieutenant of cavalry) lumbered about with his friend
an elephant; and devils, ballet-girls (by day perfect gentlemen),
_toreros_ and jockeys, frisked from one end of the rink to the
other--while one of the two seductive Viennese bands was always playing.
Patsy at last saw dancing on the ice, and lost her heart once for all
to this marvellous accomplishment. When Captain Max, in his subduing
red-and-black Mephistopheles costume, begged her to try it, she clapped
her hands like a child and flew with him to a quieter corner of the
rink where he might teach her the difficult gyrations. Before the
evening was over she was waltzing delightedly in the centre, with the
best of them. I struggle not to dote, but I must set down here that I
have seen few sights as alluring as that young witch, in her bright
Cossack’s jacket and trim skirt, gliding and whirling in the slippery
dance; with the maze of other brilliant costumes round her, the fairy
lights overhead, and in the air the lilt and thrill of a Vienna waltz.
When we went into the pavilion later for something hot, I noticed with
amazement how many of the pierrots had grey hair under their caps, and
how many of the geisha girls and pierrettes were addressed as “mother.”
“But certainly!” said our charming Frau Gräfin with spirit. “Because
they have children, are they dead? Because they have gone through much
trial in life, are they to mope in a corner and know none of life’s
joy? Pardon me, honored _meinherr_, if I suggest that they are not as
old as some of your American young people of twenty!”
I saw that we had fallen on a tender subject with the delightful
lady; who, herself the mother of a boy of twenty-eight, is (as Patsy
remarked) quite as lively as any girl of sixteen. And who, if I
remember rightly, was rather harshly criticised thereupon at the time
of her residence in Washington. She had certainly a just revenge in
her own criticism of the blasé, weary American youth of today; and the
contrast between him and the Viennese of middle age or even advanced
years as other nations number them. Fresh, _vif_, alert with interest
for everything, and time for everything as well, the Austrians may be
children to the end of their days; but they are wise children, who
stay young by design, not by incapacity.
As we have said before, they are so entirely unself-conscious that they
never fear making fools of themselves; and, in consequence, do not do
so. Young and mature, they throw themselves into everything, with a
whole-hearted abandon that in itself stimulates a like enthusiasm in
all about them. They are each other’s currents of energy that is never
exhausted, but always procreative. And nothing is too much trouble.
They will take infinite pains, and go to any amount of expense, to help
towards the success of the smallest festivity, while their thought and
generosity for others in either joy or trouble is a revelation to the
more stolid Anglo-Saxon.
Among our Viennese friends was a charming bachelor, Herr von G----. He
started to Paris one week-end, and had got as far as Munich when he
heard from someone that Patsy had tonsilitis. He took the next train
back to Vienna, and presented himself at our hotel the same evening.
It distressed me very much when I heard why he had come, as the child
was really not seriously ill; but Herr von G----said earnestly, “I
do not return to bore you; I am merely on hand if you need me.” And
for a wonder he was not in love with Patsy. The act was one of simple
friendship for us both.
When Patsy had recovered, Herr von G----, instead of going on with
his postponed journey, took us up to Semmering for two or three days
of winter sports. Here, within an hour’s ride of their own city, the
Viennese revel in the delights of lugeing, ski-ing, and sleighing--as
well as skating, of course; giving themselves to the healthful exercise
with characteristic zest and skill. The tiniest children manage their
skis with lightning dexterity, and it is beautiful to watch their small
swaying bodies skim across the snow like white birds on wing. This kind
of flying combines the æsthetic with the practical, and leaves to its
natural majesty the clearest of crisp blue skies overhead.
Tobogganing is scarcely less favoured by the Austrians, who sweep down
their dizzy hills with a vim that knows no fear. Horses are waiting at
the foot, to drag the toboggans up again; and all day long the laughing
groups of men and women, young girls, officers and children, dart down
the snowy steeps--ten and twenty strong on each sled--and are hauled
back to begin anew. Observing the crowds of Viennese who daily go to
and from Semmering, and knowing as one does many of them who would
think a week without this excursion shorn of its greatest pleasure, one
does not wonder at the happy healthy faces and splendid colour of this
sport-loving people.
In the Spring and Fall they play tennis and ride in the Prater--a large
park on the outskirts of Vienna; while in the summer everyone who can
goes walking in the Tyrol or the German mountains. Women as well as men
are expert walkers and mountain-climbers, and their horsemanship is
the pride of the nation. It is interesting to note that the Viennese
have never paid much attention to golf, and the reason: it is too tame
for them. All their sports are swift, dashing, and full of a light
individual grace. They are devoted to fencing--to anything that calls
into play the quick and skilful move of the individual body; the heavy
and brutal are unknown to them. Like children they boldly attack the
feat that lures the eye; and, like children always, achieve therein a
_succès fou_.
What is a rheumatic uncle among such people? All he can do is to open
doors--which by no amount of gymnastics is he able to shut when he
should.
III
THE FAIRY PLAY
Between officers’ cotillons and opera, _thés dansants_ and military
concerts at the Stadt Park, Patsy sandwiched conscientious layers
of sight-seeing. I am not of those who follow Baedeker (even in a
shame-faced brown linen cover), but I dutifully accompanied her to the
gallery and the royal stables, and to worship before Maria Theresa’s
emeralds in the Treasury. At the Rathaus I balked--nothing except
rice pudding is as depressing to me as a town-hall; when it came
to the Natural History Museum I was tepid also. And from that time
forth Patsy--with the irrepressible superiority that belongs to born
sightseers and to people who take cold baths--announced that she would
take the maid.
I thought this a philanthropic idea, and for several reasons worthy of
encouragement. So Patsy and the red-cheeked _mädl_ embarked on a heavy
sea of churches, the _mädl_ munching apples under rose-windows, while
Patsy inspected the pulpit. A week had been spent in this innocent
diversion, when the dire news came to us that the _mädl_ had been
taken to a hospital with peritonitis. The sour-faced spinster who
succeeded her Patsy would have none of. “I shall go alone to see the
engravings,” she announced firmly.
I resigned myself to accompany her; but when we reached the Albertina
Burg I was persuaded to take “a tiny stroll” into the Graben, and
return for Patsy in half an hour. There seemed nothing out of bounds
in this, as the library where Archduke Albert housed his engravings,
like most libraries, is sternly shunned by all but the semi-defunct and
care-takers. It shares the usual old court with the usual old palaces
of mediæval Austrian nobility; and I waited at the gate till Patsy had
entered the open square, hesitated a moment before the several doors
confronting her, and finally followed sedately in the wake of some
Americans--past a pompous gold-lace porter--into the first door on the
right. The rest of the story is hers.
She walked leisurely up some shallow stairs, without noticing at first
that the Americans had stayed behind to converse with the porter; and
that finally they went out instead of following her above. She did
think the porter was rather elaborate for a library, said Patsy, but in
Austria he didn’t seem extraordinary. The staircase was, however; and
she wondered why Baedeker had passed it by. Beautifully carved in white
marble, it was carpeted with old Turkish rugs and hung with splendid
portraits of the Hapsburgs, and--at the landings--with charming old
French clocks.
Patsy admired all these treasures at length, serenely ignoring another
and still more imposing guard who scrutinized her sharply as he
passed. She has a way with guards, has Patsy; they are generally
reduced to becoming humility, no matter how arrogantly they start in.
This one stalked on downstairs, leaving her to proceed on her way
upward. She was still searching Baedeker for the key to the interesting
portraits, and also to the whereabouts of the famous engravings--as yet
nowhere to be seen.
According to the guide-book, these should be “in two long rows above
the book-cases”; and “one should sit down at the small tables provided
for inspecting them, as the crowd of tourists makes it difficult to see
the drawings satisfactorily.” This was puzzling. Patsy, now in solitary
possession of the large room at the head of the stairs, saw neither
engravings nor tables nor tourists. She was quite alone in the centre
of the beautiful empty apartment.
She looked at the Louis Quinze furniture, at the gorgeous onyx table
set with miniatures; at the impressive portrait of Maria Theresa over
the mantelpiece, and several autographed pictures of kings. Baedeker
said nothing of all this. It occurred to Patsy then that it must have
been the reception-room of the late Archduke, and that the engravings
were probably on the floor above. But, before going on, she paused in
one of the gold and grey chairs for a moment, further to admire the
exquisite room.
While she sat there, she was startled by the sudden appearance of two
footmen, in the same grey and gold livery of the porter downstairs.
They showed no signs of surprise at her presence, however, but mumbled
obsequious greetings and backed into the room beyond. Hardly had they
disappeared when another installment of flunkies came in, carrying
great trays of food; they too, at sight of Patsy, bent as low as they
could under the circumstances--but she now was thrown into a tumult of
trepidation. When the door into the other room was opened again, she
had a glimpse of a great round table laid with gold plate and crystal
and _sèvres_; grand high-backed chairs surrounded it, and more Hapsburg
portraits lined the walls.
Patsy gasped with terror and astonishment. At last it dawned on her
that she was in the wrong place!
She caught up her furs and the miserable guide-book, and started
towards the door. Only to suffer still worse fright, when she was
confronted there by a tall man in uniform; who in most courteous French
insisted on her staying to lunch. He was young and had black hair and
blue eyes (I will not vouch for the authenticity of these details,
as Patsy just then saw all uniforms possessed of black hair and blue
eyes); and it was hard to be stiff with him. But she managed to explain
with some dignity that she had come to the Albertina to see the
engravings, but had evidently entered the wrong door; that she deeply
regretted the intrusion, which she begged this gentleman to excuse, and
that she must forthwith find her uncle who was waiting in the court
below.
I wasn’t, but that is beside the story. The blue eyes of the young
man being as keen as most Austrians’ at a second glance, he realized
his own mistake, and apologized in turn; hastening to add that
mademoiselle could not intrude in this house, as it was honoured by
her presence, and that she and her esteemed uncle would be welcome
whenever they might be gracious enough to visit it. He begged leave to
accompany her downstairs and, as Patsy could hardly refuse, she went
with him--“knees wobbling, and my heart still in my mouth, Uncle Peter!
When the glum old porter saw us, he all but went into catalepsy; and
bowed to the ground, while the nice uniformed man was talking fast to
him in German.
“Then he--the nice man--kissed my hand, and held the door for me
himself, and said all the polite things over again. I was feeling
relieved by this time, so I thought I might smile when I said _Au
revoir_, and begged pardon once more for my stupidity. I stole a last
look too at that lovely staircase and the fierce old portraits; and
now, Uncle Peter, I want to get Captain Max and find out directly whose
they are!”
Captain Max was inclined to be what Patsy calls “starchy” over the
affair. “Gray uniform--blue eyes--black hair?” he repeated tersely.
“And the door was the first on the right, in the Albertina Palace?”
Patsy nodded. Suspense overpowered her speech.
“Then it was Salvator, brother of Archduke Ferdinand, the heir to the
throne. He was probably having one of his famous little luncheons in
the Archduke’s palace.” And Captain Max scowled darkly, first at Patsy,
then at me. He thinks, poor enamoured young man, I should have a
guardian, myself.
“Then I was in the Archduke Ferdinand’s palace?” cried Patsy. “But why
was I allowed? Where were all the guards and things? I might have had a
bomb in my muff!”
“We don’t have suffragettes in Austria,” said Captain Max loftily. “And
the Heir is what you say ‘strong’ for democracy. He has fewer servants
than anybody. Those that he has were probably getting Salvator’s
luncheon ready!”
A look I well know came into Patsy’s limpid eyes. “It looked like a
very nice luncheon,” said she; “I wish now that I’d stayed.”
The _hauptmann_ coloured furiously. Then all at once he laughed. “You
will have a chance to tell him so,” he said blandly, “when you make
your curtsey to him at the ball next week!”
Really, he is not so bad, this young man for whom I opened the door.
The ball was the famous _Metternich Redoute_, given every year, during
Carnival, by the old Countess who was Austrian ambassadress at the
court of the third Napoleon. Each year she names her _masque_ by a
different fantasy and, once it is announced, excitement runs high
over costumes, head-dress, etc. This winter it was _Meeresgrund_,
“The Bottom-Of-The-Sea Ball,” and the shops along the Graben and
Kärtnerstrasse displayed seductive ropes of coral, glittering
fish-skins, pearls and golden seaweed--all the heart of mermaid could
desire. The one topic of conversation at parties, between acts at the
opera, and in the boudoir at home, closeted with anxious maids, was:
what shall her costume be for the _Meeresgrund_?
It must be something original, something _chic_ (that word that is
almost more Viennese than French), something beautiful and costly--for
does not Royalty open the ball? Patsy’s Titian head all but turned grey
during the racking period of indecision. When finally with impressive
secrecy she and the recovered _mädl_ had spirited her disguise behind
locked doors, there was still a tantalizing week before the great
event. I did what I could to assuage impatience, in the way of opera
tickets, concerts and a performance of Duse.
Over the actress Patsy went as mad as any Viennese; and even I
cried a mild _bravo_ or two. Curious, how the sight of a charming
woman playing a captivating part, like _La Locandiera_, has the
effect of opening one’s mouth, and making one emit strange sounds!
The same thing happened to me at the Sunday-morning concert of the
_Männergesangverein_--it looks like a Sanskrit idiom, but it is a
simple society of simple Viennese business-men, clubbed together to
sing a delightful two hours on an occasional Sabbath morning. They make
no pretense at high art, but are fated (by birth and every instinct) to
achieve it; and when they stand up, two hundred strong, and roll out
the majestic phrases of Beethoven’s “Hymn of Praise,” it is time for
even a moth-eaten mere relative to make a fool of himself.
I behaved better at opera. If there is any behaviour in one, opera
will bring it out. In Vienna, I mean, of course; not in New York or
Paris or Covent Garden, where manners and clothes to be _au fait_ must
be _au minimum_--and where the real performance is mannequin parade, by
the great jewellers and dressmakers. In Vienna, opera-goers have the
unique custom of going to hear opera. They arrive on time; or if they
do not they wait outside in the corridor till the end of the first act.
The conclusion is drawn by the audience in general, that it is present
to hear and see what is going on up on the stage; any interruption to
this, whether of whispering or rattled programmes, is rudely hissed.
While one who attempts to leave or to approach his seat after the first
note of the overture has been sounded finds himself detained with
greater force than fondness. The rare premise is entertained that opera
is designed to furnish music, and that the music is worth hearing. It
does not seem to occur to anyone to dispute this by leaving before the
final note is struck, and the final curtain falls. To the New Yorker
especially, thirsting for his champagne and lobster, this must be a
diverting system.
But the New Yorker has probably disdained Vienna opera altogether as
too cheap to be worth anything. The best seats in the house are only
three dollars, while excellent places may be had for half that price,
and the students and enthusiasts up in the gallery pay a sixth of
it. Officers come off better still: in the circular pit reserved for
them, though they have to stand, these servants of the Emperor pay the
Imperial Opera only eighty _hellers_ (eight-pence). Of course there
is a goodly show of uniforms all over the house as well; and, with the
pretty toilettes of the women, the audience is a gay and attractive
one. Though the horseshoe is only about half the size of the New York
Metropolitan Opera, there is a comfortable intimacy in its rich gold
and scarlet loges; besides (the one elegance the Metropolitan lacks)
the quartered trappings of the royal box.
This last is often occupied by one or another of the Archdukes and
their wives, and several times a year the Emperor himself is present.
Then it is gala performance, and all ladies who attend must be in light
evening frocks; gentlemen, of course, in the regulation claw-hammer.
It is somewhat disconcerting to see--as I did for the first time--this
fashionable assembly extract from its coat pockets a generous ham
sandwich, and begin to eat it before the curtain goes up; also to watch
the rows of elegant ladies and gentlemen waiting their turn in line at
the refreshment bar between acts, and to behold the enthusiasm with
which they devour large cheese cakes and beer. The fact is that opera
in Vienna begins so early--seven o’clock, as a rule--few people have a
chance to dine before they leave home; and they are far too sensible
to sit hungry through a long performance, or to satisfy their appetite
surreptitiously, as Anglo-Saxons would. They want food, and they go and
get it--in as frank quantity as they desire. I have seen our charming
Frau Gräfin dispose of as many as nine ham sandwiches in the course
of an evening, calmly whisking the crumbs from her white satin gown
meanwhile.
It is superfluous to speak of the all-satisfying delight of the music
itself at the Imperial Opera. No one who has seen Weingartner conduct
needs to have it described. For no one who has not seen him can it be
described. Sufficient to say that the merits of the piece are not left
in the hands of a quartet of fabulously paid principals, or to the
luxurious detail of extravagant mounting; but that every voice in the
chorus, every inconspicuous instrument of the orchestra, is planned
and trained and worked into an _ensemble_ as perfect as a master ear
can make it. And the _bravos_ that resound at the end of each act are
the sure token of the master’s success; for nowhere is there a more
critical or a more appreciative opera audience than in Vienna.
This is true of the _Volksopera_ as well as of the Imperial. Though at
the “People’s Opera” the lighter pieces are given for half the price
charged at the more pretentious house, the lower middle class who
attend them are no less musically trained and difficult to satisfy.
But while every class demands and is given high excellence in classical
music, it is in the operette that they unconsciously recognize and
worship the true soul of Vienna. As far removed from English musical
comedy as caviar from candy, this sparkling, rippling, dashing whirl
of airs and waltzes seems to catch up the familiar types out of the
streets and cafés, ballrooms and boudoirs, and present them here on
the stage _en masse_. In place of the musical comedy milkmaid, with her
Louis heels and pink satin décolleté, we have the well-known students
and _grisettes_, _grandes dames_ and varnished old _noceurs_ seen in
the Graben every day. They wear real clothes, and say real things, and
make real mistakes--all to the most entrancing music Franz Lehar or Leo
Fall can contrive; and the result is a madness of delight on the part
of the audience, such as comes only when people are shown _themselves_.
Shocking? Yes, frequently. The Viennese and their operettes that
reflect them are apt to shock many a conventional-minded foreigner.
They even shock themselves sometimes--but excuse the episode a minute
later. For they are quick to forgive, and are not over-particular as
to morals, if the person eschewing them be gay, attractive and clever.
Hence the heroes and heroines of their operettes are audacious to a
degree somewhat startling to the uninitiated in Viennese life.
But they make up for it in _verve_ and brilliancy. See them dash
through three acts of wit and lightning movement--with all their
liveliness they never romp; hear them sing their complicated, racing
songs, without a fault; watch them whirl and glide in the heady
waltz--laughing, dancing, singing all at once, and perfectly. Shocking?
you cry, pounding your cane to bits in time with the tune. Piffle!
It does not do to say this to Patsy. But Patsy, happily, understands
very little German; so that I was able to indulge my vice for operettes
with her uncurbed. Patsy’s thoughts were all on the _Meeresgrund_. As
we intended to leave Vienna the day after that, it may without fantasy
be supposed that some of her less well-behaved thoughts left the bottom
of the sea for a certain skating rink, where she had learned the
guiding value of blue eyes and black hair. But outwardly everything was
concentrated on the Redoute.
I am not a spiteful person, but I was inclined to gloat when the
momentous night arrived, and Patsy, in her shimmering costume,
confronted our good Countess. American youth settled its score, I
think. For the good lady--herself marvellous in lobster pink and
a white wig--flew to Patsy, kissed her on both cheeks, and cried:
“_Aber!_ It is of an enchantment, a loveliness of fairies, _wunderbar_!”
And, if I do say it who had no part in the creation, she was right.
Patsy stood before us as a fisher girl, her filmy golden nets caught
over her shoulders and round the waist with glistening crabs and little
brilliant lizards. In contrast with the other women present and their
elaborate headgear, the witch had let down her rippling auburn curls to
fall in simple glory to her waist. Her cheeks were softly flushed, and
her big yellow-brown eyes were shining as she asked demurely, “Do you
like me, Uncle Peter?”
I was not too dazzled to forget it was not I actually being asked.
But as Captain Max maintained absolute silence--that most ominous of
answers!--I replied with nice restraint that I found her charming. And
we entered the ball.
It was a vast hall surrounded by shallow galleries, and at the far
end a platform arranged in the style of a royal drawing-room. In the
ballroom itself great ropes of seaweed and ruddy coral hung pendant
down the blue-green walls; mammoth shells of palest pink held the
mermaids’ chaperones; a fairy ship twinkled one entire side of the hall
with favors and fancies awaiting the dance of the sirens; while at
every nook and corner lustrous crinkled pearls gleamed forth light.
The glassy floor pool in the midst of all this fantasy was crowded with
Neptunes and nereids, water sprites, lovely white chiffon gulls, and
Loreleis with their combs of gold. But they were very modern Loreleis,
who kept their hair up in correct ondulation, and whose fascinations
proved less irresistible than those of one little red-locked fisher
girl. Like everybody else, she was masked, and flitted about the
giant circle of the promenade with a tall Captain of the Guards in
brilliant full-dress uniform. The Metternich Redoute is the one event
of Carnival at which only the women appear in fancy dress. The officers
and civilians, in sober garb, form a phalanx in the center of the room,
whence they watch the gorgeous procession of _promeneuses_. For until
the Court arrives everyone walks about and admires everyone else, while
one of the two royal bands plays constantly. Laughing masked ladies,
unknown to one another, exchange gay greetings; compliments are
bestowed and received in German, French, English, Spanish, Italian and
Hungarian; while the familiar “_du_” is the rule of the evening.
All at once something electric passes over the chattering assembly.
From a splendid shifting mass it divides into two solid lines, leaving
a broad open space down the centre. The sprightly old hostess is in
her place, the bands burst into the stirring chords of the national
hymn--and the Court enters!
First the old Emperor with his two gentlemen of the Household:
erect, fiercely handsome in his blue-gray uniform of the Hapsburgs
glittering with orders. The young lieutenants who have spent the
afternoon ridiculing his war policy, at sight of the well-known,
grizzled head, forget their grievances and salute with a fervour. The
old man, haughtily unconscious, passes on. Next comes the young Heir
Apparent, with Archduchess Maria Annunziata--the Emperor’s niece and
the first lady of the land--who wears Maria Theresa’s emeralds and a
magnificent tiara overshadowing those of the ladies who follow her. But
each of them, too, is ablaze with jewels, while for sheer beauty and
distinction a more remarkable retinue of women could not be found.
There is the ruddy fairness of the German, the wild grace of the Slav,
the rich olive and great dark eyes of the Hungarian, the chestnut
hair and black brows of Lombardy: every type as it passes is sworn
the loveliest--and then forsworn when the next comes by. The court
ladies have confined their fantasy to the coiffure, and some of these
headdresses are marvels of ingenuity and elegance. Wigs are much
favoured; white and high, and crowned with ships of jewels, or monster
pearls, or nets of diamonds interwoven with every sort of precious
stone. The archdukes and high officers, in their mere uniforms, for
once are insignificant in the trail of this effulgence of their women;
and Patsy did not even see her Prince Salvator till all of them were
seated on the platform and the ball was formally begun.
Twelve young girls and men of the nobility open the dance with a
quadrille, prescribed according to court etiquette, and marked by a
quaint stateliness. The girls are dressed alike in simple frocks of
white and silver, while the young men are in more or less elaborate
uniform. After the quadrille, dancing is general, but the crowd is too
great for it to be any pleasure at first. Not till after the Court
has gone is there really room to move about in. Meanwhile, favoured
personages are led to the Master of Ceremonies, and by him presented to
Royalty on its dais.
Thanks to Countess H----, Patsy and I were permitted to pay homage; and
even the severe old Emperor himself unbent to smile at the witch in her
shimmering frock when she made her _révérence_. There was a look about
Patsy that night that a stone image must have melted to--a radiance at
once so soft and so bright, no man could have resisted, or woman failed
to understand. I can see her now, the colour deepening in her cheek as
she made her curtsey to Archduke Salvator. Captain Max was just behind
her, the Countess and I at one side.
The Archduke--who did have blue eyes and black hair--was about to
return Patsy’s salutation with his bow of ceremony when suddenly he
looked into her face. His own for a moment was a study. Then, gazing
over her shoulder at Captain Max in his glowering magnificence, he
inquired gravely: “And this, then, is the uncle?”
The rose swept Patsy’s cheek to her slender neck. For an instant she
hesitated; then, looking straight at me instead of at the Archduke, she
said sturdily: “This is the uncle’s nephew-to-be, and your Highness is
the first one to learn of it.”
Of course the Countess turned faint, and all but forgot court etiquette
in a frenzied hunt for her salts; and the Archduke kissed Patsy’s
hand and shook Max’s, and amid a host of incoherent congratulations,
discovered that he and Max belonged to the same regiment; and somehow
we bowed ourselves out of the Presence and into the gallery again.
The Countess embraced Patsy, within shelter of a
blue--pasteboard--grotto, and would have carried her off for a good
cry, but Patsy turned to me. “Uncle Peter,” she swung to my arm with
that destructive wheedlesomeness of hers, “Uncle Peter, you _are_
pleased?”
Max, too, approached me with an anxiety that would have flattered
a Pharaoh. “Patsy,” said I, admirably concealing my overwhelming
surprise, “I have only one thing to say: _you_ shall be the one to tell
your mother!”
Of course she wasn’t. I knew from the first that she wouldn’t be; and
I meekly endured the consequences. But all that is sequel. For the
rest of the Redoute I sat with the Countess in the jaws of a papier
mâché crocodile, and ate macaroons and discussed family pedigree; and
Patsy and my nephew-elect fed off glances and waltzed till five in the
morning. It was the most hectic evening of my two score years and ten.
When at last we left the bottom of the sea, gaiety was at its crest.
The Court had departed long since, but nymphs and nereids whirled more
madly than ever, Lorelies spun their lures with deeper cunning than
before--now they were unmasked; and mere men were being drawn forever
further and further into the giddy, gorgeous opalescence of the maze.
In retrospect they seemed caught and clung to by the twining ropes of
coral; mermaids and men alike enmeshed within the shining seaweed and
pale, rosy shells--compassed, held about by the blue-green walls of
their translucent prison. The pearly lights gleamed softer, the music
of the sirens floated sweeter and more seductive on each wave, the
water sprites and cloudy gulls circled and swam in wilder, lovelier
haze.
And then--the wand of realism swept over them. They were a laughing,
twirling crowd of Viennese, abandoned to the intoxication of their
deity: the dance. Reckless, pleasure-mad, never flagging in pursuit
of the evanescent _joie de vivre_, they became all at once a band of
extravagant, lovable children who had stayed up too late and ought to
have been put to bed.
But I was always a doting uncle. I left them to their revel, and
departed. I shall go back some day, for I have now in Vienna the gay,
the _gemütlich_, a niece named Patsy--and it all came from choosing a
train that arrived before breakfast!
IV
THE BROKEN-DOWN ACTOR
(Madrid)
[Illustration: THE SOUL OF OLD SPAIN]
I
HIS CORNER APART
In spirit, as in distance, it is a far cry from the childlike gaiety
and extravagance of Vienna to the gloom and haughty poverty of Madrid.
Gloomy in its psychic rather than its physical aspects is this city of
the plain, for while the sun scorches in summer and the wind chills in
winter, thanks to the quite modern architecture of New Madrid, there is
ample light and space all the year round.
Any Spanish history will tell you that Charles V chose this place for
his capital because the climate was good for his gout. One author
maintains that it was for the far subtler reason that Madrid was
neutral ground between the jealous cities of Toledo, Valladolid and
Seville. But everyone, past and present, agrees that the Spanish
capital is the least Spanish of any town in the kingdom. It shares but
one distinctive trait with the rest of Spain--and that the dominant
trait of the nation: pride, illimitable and unconditioned, in the glory
of the past; oblivion to the ruin of the present.
Like a great artist whose star has set, Spain sits aloof from the
modern powers she despises; wrapped in her enshrouding cloak of
self-sufficiency, she dreams or prattles garrulously of the days when
she ruled without peer--not heeding, not even knowing, that the stage
today is changed beyond her recognition.
The attitude is, however, far more interesting than the bustle and mere
business efficiency of the typical modern capital. After the vastness
and confusion of Waterloo and St. Lazare, one arrives in Madrid at a
little station suggestive of a sleepy provincial town. Porters are
few and far between, and one generally carries one’s own bags to the
primitive horse cabs waiting outside. Taxis are almost unheard of, and
the few that are seen demand prices as fabulous as those of New York.
Every _Madrileño_ who can possibly afford it has a carriage, but the
rank and file use the funny little trams--which I must say, however,
are excellently conducted and most convenient.
Both the trams and all streets and avenues are plainly marked with
large clear signs, and the pleasant compactness of the city makes it
easy to find one’s way about. The centre of life and activity is the
Puerto del Sol--Gate of the Sun--an oval plaza which Spaniards fondly
describe as “the busiest square in the world.” There is no doubt at all
that it is the noisiest; with its clanging trams, rattling carriages,
shouting street vendors, and ambulant musicians.
These latter, with the beggars, form to my mind the greatest plague
of Madrid; their number is legion, their instruments strangely and
horribly devised, and they have the immoral generosity to play on, just
the same, whether you give them money or not. Though, as a matter of
fact, when you walk in the Puerta del Sol, they are forever under your
feet, shaking their tin cups for _centimos_ and whining for attention.
I infinitely prefer the gentle-voiced old men--of whom there is also
an army--who offer soft balls of puppies for sale; and, when they are
refused, tenderly return the cherished scrap to their warm pockets. The
swarm of impish newsboys are hard to snub, too: Murillo has ingratiated
them with one forever--their rags and their angelic brown eyes in
rogues’ faces.
But I find no difficulty at all in refusing the beggars. These are of
every age, costume and infirmity; and enjoy full privilege of attacking
citizen or stranger, without intervention of any kind by the police.
A Spanish lady naïvely explained to me that they had indeed tried to
deal with the beggars; that the government had once deported them one
and all to the places where they were born--for _of course_ none of
them came originally from Madrid! But, would I believe it, within a
week they were all back again? Perhaps I, as a foreigner, could not
understand how the poor creatures simply loved Madrid too passionately
to remain away.
I assured the señora gravely I could understand. In fact, it seems to
me entirely normal to be passionately attached to a place that yields
one a tidy income for nothing. No, rather for the extensive development
and use of one’s persuasive powers. Imagination, too, and diplomacy
must be employed; and sometimes the nice art of “coming down.” The
monologue runs like this:
“Good afternoon, gentleman. The gentleman is surely the most handsome,
the most kind-hearted, the best-dressed, and most polite of all the
world. If the gentleman could part with a peseta--nine-pence--to a
brother in deepest woe, God would reward him. God would give him still
more elegant health and more ravishing children. If he has no children,
God would certainly send him some--for only half a peseta, oh, gracious
gentleman. To a brother whose afflictions could not be recited from
now till the end of the world, so multiple, so heartrending are they.
I am an old man of seventy, oh, most beautiful gentleman--old as the
gentleman’s illustrious father, may Mary and the angels grant him long
life! Only twenty centimos, my gentleman--God will give you a million.
Ten centimos--five!... _Caramba!_ a curse on your hideous face and
loping gait. There is no uglier toad this side of hell!”
One thing beggars _can_ choose with proficiency: their language. In
Madrid they would be less disgusting were it not for their loathsome
diseases and deformities. The government is far too poor to isolate
them in asylums, so they continue to possess the streets and the
already overcrowded Gate of the Sun.
From this plaza the principal thoroughfares of the city branch off in a
sort of wheel, and mules, goats and donkeys laden with every imaginable
sort of burden pass to and fro at all hours of day and night. Shops
there are, of course, of various kinds; and cafés crowded round the
square; but the waiters carry the trays on their heads, and the whole
atmosphere is that of a mediæval interior town rather than a modern
cosmopolitan city.
To be sure, in Alcalà, the principal street off the Puerta del Sol,
there are clubs and up-to-date restaurants; but only men are supposed
to go to the restaurants, and in the clubs they look ill at ease and
incongruous. The life of the Spaniard is inalienably the life in the
streets, where you will find him at all hours, strolling along in his
clothes of fantastic cut and colour or sitting at a café, drinking
_horchatas_--the favourite beverage, made from a little nut. His
constant expression is a steady stare; varying from the dreamily
absent-minded to the crudely vulgar and licentious.
The widely diversified ancestry of the Spanish people is keenly
interesting to follow out in the features of the men and women of
today; among no race is there greater variety of type, though it is
four hundred years since the Moors and Jews were driven out, and new
blood has been practically excluded from Spain. Yet one sees the
Moorish and Jewish casts as distinct today as ever they were; to say
nothing of the aquiline Roman or the ruddy Gothic types from the far
more ancient period.
In names, too, history is eloquent: we find Edwigis, Gertrudis, and
Clotilde of the Gothic days; Zenaida and Agueda of the Moorish;
Raquel, Ester of the Jewish. I think that in no language is there
such variety or beauty in women’s names. Take, for example, Consuelo,
Amparo (Succour), Luz--pronounced Luth and meaning Light--or Felicitas,
Rosario, Pílar, Soledad, and a wealth of others as liquid and as
significant.
It is hard to attach them to the rather mediocre women one sees in
the streets on their way to mass: dressed in cheap tailored frocks, a
flimsy width of black net over their heads. The mantilla is no longer
current in Madrid, except for _fiestas_ and as the caprice of the
wealthy; but this shoddy offspring of the mantilla--the inferior black
veil--is everywhere seen on all classes of women. The _Madrileña_ who
wears a hat announces herself rich beyond recounting, and is charged
accordingly in the shops. Needless to say, there is no such thing as a
fixed price in any but the places of foreign origin.
I have often wondered whether Spanish women are stupid because they are
kept in such seclusion or whether they are secluded because they are
stupid. It is hard to separate the cause from the effect. But certainly
the Spanish beauty of song and story is rarer than rubies today; while
the animation that gives charm even to an ugly French or American
woman is utterly lacking in the _Española’s_ heavy, rather sensual
features. I am inclined to think, from the fact that it is saliently
a man’s country, she is as he has made her, or allowed her to become.
And when you remember that her highest enjoyment is to drive through
the rough-paved streets, hour after hour, that she may see and be seen;
when you consider that the rest of her day is spent in a cheerless
house without a book or a magazine, or any occupation but menial
household drudgery, you pity rather than condemn the profound ignorance
of the average Spanish woman.
Married at sixteen, the mother of four or five children by the time she
is twenty-five, she grows old before her time even as a Latin woman.
While by men she is disregarded and treated with a rudeness and lack of
respect revolting to the Anglo-Saxon. Her husband precedes her into and
out of the room, leaves her the less comfortable seat, blows smoke in
her face, and expectorates in her presence; all as a matter of course,
which she accepts in the same spirit. Her _raison d’être_ is as a
female; nothing more. What wonder that the brain she has is expended in
gossip and intrigue and that her husband openly admits he cannot trust
her out of his sight?
Like the Eastern women she resembles, she is superstitiously devout;
as, indeed, the men are, too, when they remember to be. All the
morning, weekdays as well as Sunday, the churches are full; one mass
succeeds another. It is a favourite habit of the younger men to wait
outside the fashionable churches until the girls and their duenas come
out, and then to remark quite audibly on the charms of the former.
The compliments are of the most bare-faced variety, but are affably
received; even sometimes returned by a discreet retort _sotto voce_.
The blades call the custom “throwing flowers”; and the bolder of the
maidens are apt to fling back over their shoulder, “thanks for the
flower!”
One can always see this little comedy outside the well-known church
of San Isidro--patron saint of Madrid--which, with the more important
clubs and public buildings, is in the Street of the Alcalà. The Alcalà
connects the Puerta del Sol with the famous promenades of the Prado and
the Castellana, which are joined together by an imposing plaza with a
fountain, and extend as far as the park of the Retiro.
Spaniards are firmly convinced that the Castellana is finer than the
Champs Elysées; but it is, in reality, a rather stupid avenue--broad,
and with plenty of trees in pots of water, yet quite flat, and lacking
the quaint _guignols_ and smart restaurants that give color to the
French promenade. Galician nursemaids, with their enormous earrings,
congregate round the ice-cream booths, while their overdressed charges
play “bullfight” or “circus” in the allées nearby.
But the Castellana is an empty stretch of sand, for the most part,
until half-past six in the evening, when it becomes for an hour or two
the liveliest quarter of the city. The mansions on either side of the
street open their gates, carriages roll forth, _señoras_ in costumes
of French cut but startling hue are bowled into the central driveway,
_señors_ in equally impressive garments appear on horseback, and the
“_paseo_”--the event of the day--has begun.
Strangers who have not been asked to dine with their Spanish friends
because the latter cannot afford a cook will be repeatedly taken to
drive in a luxurious equipage with two men on the box and a pair of
high-stepping bays. For a Spanish family will scrimp and save, and
sometimes actually half starve, in order to maintain its place in the
daily procession on the Castellana. This is true of all classes, from
the impoverished aristocracy to the struggling bourgeoisie; and is so
much a racial characteristic that the same holds in Manila, Havana, and
many of the South American cities. What his house is to the Englishman,
his trip to Europe to the American, his carriage is to the Spaniard.
With this hallmark of social solvency he can hold up his head with the
proudest; without it he is an outcast.
The Madrileños tell among themselves of certain ladies who afford the
essential victoria by dressing fashionably from the waist up only. A
carriage rug covers the other and well-worn part of their apparel.
This is consistent with stories of economy carried into the smallest
item of the household expenses--such as cooking without salt or
pepper, and foregoing a tablecloth--in order that the family name may
appear among the box-holders at the opera. Spanish people look upon
these sacrifices, when they know them, as altogether admirable; from
peasant to grandee, they are forever aiding and abetting each other at
that most pitiful of all games: keeping up appearances. But, however
petty the apparent motive, there is a certain tragic courage behind
it; the desperate, final courage of the _grand artiste_, refusing to
admit that his day is dead. And under all his burdens, all his bitter
poverty, silent, uncomplaining.
Seen in this light, that stately queue of carriages on the Castellana
takes on something more than its mere superficial significance--which
is to show oneself, and further to show one’s daughters. Officers and
civilians walk up and down, on either side of the driveway, or canter
along near the carriages, with one object: to stare at the young girls.
Far from being snubbed, their interest is welcomed with complaisance,
and many and many a marriage is arranged from one of these encounters
on the Castellana.
The young man notices the same girl for two or three days, then asks
to be presented to her; the heads of the two families confer, finances
are frankly discussed, and, if everything is found satisfactory, the
courtship is allowed to proceed. Parents are generally easy to satisfy,
too, being in frantic haste to marry off their daughters. The old maid
and the bachelor girl are unknown quantities in Spain, and an officer
with a salary of five pounds a month is eagerly snapped up as an
excellent catch.
This gives some idea of the absolute pittance whole families are
used to live on, and to consider ample. The bare necessities of life
are gratefully counted by Spaniards as luxuries; while luxuries, in
the modern sense of the word, are practically unheard of. Private
motor cars, for example, are so rare as to be noticed when they
pass through the streets; while, on the other hand, a sleek pair of
mules is considered almost as emphatic a sign of prosperity as a
pair of horses. It is an everyday sight to see the gold cockades of
royalty, or the silver of nobility, on the box behind two mules. And a
Spaniard realizes nothing curious about this. If it is a habit of his
countrymen, it is right, and proper, and elegant, and to be emulated by
all who can afford it.
If you tell him, moreover, of the conveniences of other countries--not
in comparison with his own, but quite casually--he looks at you with
an indulgent smile, and believes not a word of it. He himself is far
too poor to travel, so that naturally he is skeptical of what he calls
“traveller’s tales.” I once showed a Marqués whom I was entertaining
in Madrid a picture of the Metropolitan Tower in New York. He laughed,
like an amused child. “Those Americans! They are always boasting,” he
said, “but one must confess they are clever to construct a photograph
like that.” Nor was I able to convince him during the remainder of the
evening that such a building and many others as tall actually did exist.
The old actor sits with his eyes glued to his own pictures, mesmerizing
himself into the belief that they are now as ever they were:
representative of the greatest star of all the stage. He cares not
to study the methods of the new generation, for he loftily ignores
its existence. Tradition is the poison that infests his bones, and is
surely eating them away.
He has a son who would save him if the dotard would permit: a tall
young man, with a splendid carriage and an ugly, magnetic face--alert
to every detail of modern régime. But the young man is a king, and
kings, as everyone knows, have the least power of anybody. Alfonso
XIII, with all his indefatigable energy, can leaven but a very small
lump of the blind self-sufficiency of Spain. He plays a hopeless part
bravely and is harder-working than most of his peasants.
His palace stands at the edge of old Madrid, on the high land above
the river, where the old Moorish Alcazar once stood: a magnificent
situation. The façade fronts and dominates the city; the rear looks
out on the river Mazanares and beyond, on the royal park of the Casa
del Campo. Here one can often see the King shooting pigeons in the
afternoon or taking tea with the Queen and the Queen Mother. The people
are not permitted in this park, but foreigners may apply for a card
of admission and go there at any time, provided their coachman is in
livery.
[Illustration:
_Franzen_
THE QUEEN OF SPAIN AND THE PRINCE OF THE ASTURIAS]
One Sunday I saw the royal children, with their nurses, building
a bonfire in a corner of the park. They were shouting and running
about most lustily, and it was a relief to see royalty--though at
the age of three and four--having a good time. The little Prince of
the Asturias was in uniform, Prince Jaimé in sailor’s togs, and the
two small Infantas in white frocks with blue sashes. They all looked
simply and comfortably dressed, and a credit to the good sense of their
father and mother. The nurses, who are Englishwomen--pink-cheeked
and cheerful--wore plain blue cotton frocks and shady straw hats,
like anyone else’s nurses. It was a satisfying picture, after the
elaborateness and false show that surround the average Spanish child.
Of all the royal children, Jaimé is the beloved of the people. He has a
singularly sweet and at the same time animated face, and, the Spaniards
proudly declare, is the true Spanish type. Doubtless, too, his sad
infirmity--he was born a deaf mute--and his patience and cleverness in
coping with it have endeared this little prince to everybody.
The reigning Spanish family are the last of the powerful Bourbons, and
their court is conducted with all the Bourbon etiquette of Louis XIV.
It is a less brilliant court than the Austrian, being very much poorer,
but the shining white grandeur of the palace itself makes up for
elegance foregone by the courtiers. For once, Spain’s overweening pride
is justified: she boasts the loveliest royal residence of any nation.
An interesting time to visit it is at Guard Mount in the morning. Then
the beautiful inner court is filled with Lancers in plumed helmets and
brilliant blue uniforms, riding splendidly matched roans. Two companies
of infantry, in their darker blue and red, line the hollow square; and
in the centre are the officers, magnificently mounted and aglitter
with gold braid and orders. They advance into the court to the slow
and stately measure of the Royal March, and sometimes the King appears
on the balcony above--to the delight of the people, who are allowed to
circulate freely in the passages of the pillared _patio_.
Peasants are there by the score, in their shabby earth-brown
corduroys, and soft-eyed girls with stout duenas, swaying fans
between the threadbare fingers of their cheap cotton gloves. Students
with faded capes swung from their shoulders; swarms of children and
shuffling old men in worn sombreros; priests, bullfighters, beggars,
and vendors of everything from sweetmeats to bootlaces, wander in and
out the arcades while the band plays.
In spite of the modern uniforms of the soldiers, it is a scene out of
another age: a sleepy, sunny age, when all the simple people demanded
was a heel of bread and the occasional spectacle of the pomp of their
masters. Yet it is the Spain of today; in the foreground its brave show
of traditional splendour; peering out from behind, its penury and rags.
The old actor sees none of this. In his forgotten corner he has wound
himself within his gorgeous tattered cloak of long ago; and crouches
into it, eyes closed upon a vision in which he never ceases to play the
part of Cæsar.
II
HIS ARTS AND AMUSEMENTS
_Pan y toros!_ The old “Bread and the circus” of the Romans, the
mediæval and modern “Bread and the bulls!” of Spain. One feels that the
dance should have been worked in, really to make this cry of the people
complete. For in the bullfight and the ancient national dances we have
the very soul of Spain.
Progressive Spaniards like to think the _corrida de toros_ is gradually
dying out; many, many people in Madrid, they tell you, would not think
of attending one. This is true, though generally the motive behind it
is financial rather than humane. And the great mass of the people,
aristocracy as well as _bourgeoisie_, put the bulls first, and go
hungry for the bread if necessary. Every small boy, be he royal or
beggar, plays “bullfight” from the time he can creep; every small girl
looks on admiringly, and claps her hands. And when the small boy is
grown, and dazzles the Bull Ring with his daring _toreo_, the girl
in her brilliant dancer’s dress still applauds and flings him her
carnations. Throughout Spain the two are wedded in actual personal
passion, as in symbolic truth.
It is said that the bullfight was founded by the Moors in Spain in the
twelfth century, though bulls were probably fought with before that
in the Roman amphitheatres. The principle on which the play depends
is courage, coolness, and dexterity--the three-in-one characteristics
of the Arabs of the desert. In early days gentlemen, armed only with
a short spear, fought with the bulls, and proved their skill and
horsemanship. But with the coming of the Bourbons as the reigning house
of Spain the sport changed from a fashionable into a national one, and
professional bullfighters took the place of the courtly players of
before.
It is by no means true, however--as so many foreigners imagine--that
the _toreros_ are invariably men of mean birth and vulgar education.
On the contrary, they are frequently of excellent parentage and great
mental as well as physical capability; while always their keen science
and daring make them an aristocracy of themselves which the older
aristocracy delights to worship. They are the friends and favourites of
society, the idols of the populace; you never see one of them in the
streets without an admiring train of hangers-on, and the newspapers
record the slightest item in connection with each fighter of the hour.
Whole pages are filled with photographs of the various feats and
characteristic poses of distinguished _toreros_; and so well known do
these become that an audience in the theatre recognizes at once an
“imitation” of Bombita, or Gallito, or Machaquito--and shouts applause.
Even the average bullfighter is a rich man and known for his generosity
as well. Directly there is a disaster--railway accident, explosion or
flood--a _corrida_ is arranged for the sufferers; and the whole band
of fighters give their earnings to the cause. The usual profits of a
skilled _torero_ are seven thousand pesetas--two hundred and eighty
pounds--a performance. Out of this he must pay his assistants about
three thousand pesetas, and the rest he has for himself. When not the
lover of some famous dancer, he is often a married man, and they say,
aside from his dangerous profession, makes an excellent husband and
father. One and all, the bullfighters are religious; the last thing
they do before entering the arena is to confess and receive absolution
in the little chapel at the Bull Ring, and a priest remains with
extreme unction always in readiness in case of serious accident.
The great part of the bullfighters come from Andalucia--there is
an academy at Seville to teach the science--but some are from the
North and from Mexico and South America, and all are impatient to
fight at Madrid, since successful _toreo_ in this city constitutes
the bullfighter’s diploma. At the first--and so of course the most
exciting--fight I saw the _matadors_ were Bombita and Gallito,
from Seville, and Gaona, from Mexico. The latter was even more
cordially received by the Spaniards than their own countrymen after
they saw his splendid play; but Bombita is acknowledged the best
_matador_--killer--in Spain, and Gallito, a mere boy of eighteen,
is adored by the people. Each of the three killed two bulls on the
afternoon I attended my first _corrida_.
It is impossible to describe the change that comes over the whole
aspect and atmosphere of Madrid on the day of a bullfight. The old
actor in his corner rubs his eyes, shakes himself and looks alive.
Crowds are in the streets, buckboards packed with country people dash
through the Puerta del Sol and towards the Plaza de Toros; the languid
_madrileño_ in the cafés is roused to rapid talk and excited betting
with his neighbour, and in the clubs, where the _toreros_ are gathered
in their gorgeous costumes, the betting runs higher. Ticket booths are
surrounded by a mob of eager enthusiasts, while behind her grating the
señora is shaking out her mantilla, fixing the great red and white
carnations in her hair, draping the lace above them and her monstrous
comb. A carriage drives swiftly down the street to her door, her
husband hurries in, calling impetuously to make haste. The slumbrous
eyes of the lady catch fire with a thousand sparks; she clicks her fan,
flashes a last triumphant smile into her mirror, and is swept away to
the Bull Ring.
[Illustration: FAIR ENTHUSIASTS AT THE BULL FIGHT]
Here all is seething anticipation: the immense coliseum black with
people moving to their seats or standing up to watch the crowd in the
arena below; Royalty just arrived, Doña Isabel and her ladies lining
the velvet-hung box with their picturesque mantillas; the President of
the Bull Ring taking his place of honour; ladies unfurling fans and
gossiping, _aficionados_ waving to one another across the ring and
calling final excited bets; small boys shouting cushions, cigarettes,
postcards, or beer and _horchatas_. Suddenly a bugle sounds. People
scuttle to their seats, the arena is cleared as by magic, and, to a
burst of music and thunderous applause from ten thousand pairs of
hands, the splendid _entrada_ takes place.
_Matadors_ in their bright suits heavy with gold, _banderilleros_ in
their silver, _picadors_ on their sorry horses, march proudly round the
ring; while the band plays and the crowd shouts itself hoarse--just for
a starter. Then the _picadors_ go out, the _torero_ who is to kill the
first bull asks the President for the keys to the ring; the President
throws them into the arena, and--the first bull is loosed!
From this point on there is no wit in regarding the spectacle from
a humane or sentimental standpoint. He who is inclined to do so had
better never have left home. If he has eyes for the prodigal bloodshed,
the torture of the bull with the piercing darts, the sufferings of
the horses, he will be acutely wretched from beginning to end. But if
he can fix his attention solely on the beauty of the _torero’s_ body
in constant action, on the utter fearlessness and superb audacity of
the man in his taunting the beast; if, in short, he can concentrate
on the science and skill of the thing, he will have something worth
remembering all his life.
I shall never forget Bombita, with his grave, curiously _detached_
expression, his dark face almost indifferent as he came forward to
kill the first bull. This is by far the most interesting part of the
fight--after the horses have been disposed of and the stupid _picadors_
have made their exit--when the _matador_ advances with his sword
sheathed in the red _muleta_. He has made his speech to the President,
he has ordered his assistants to retire to the background, and he and
the bull face one another alone in the centre of the arena.
Then comes the lightning move of every moment in the encounter between
man and beast. The spot between the shoulders where the bull is
killed covers only about three inches, and must be struck absolutely
true--or the crowd is furious. At best it is exceedingly capricious,
hissing, whistling and shouting on the slightest provocation, but
going literally mad over each incident of the matador’s daring;
and finally, if he makes a “neat kill,” throwing their hats and
coats--anything--into the arena while the air reverberates with
“Bravos!”
[Illustration:
_L. R. Marin_
THE SUPREME MOMENT: MAN AND BEAST JUGGLE FOR LIFE]
Meantime, however, the _matador_ plays with death every second. He
darts towards the bull, taunting the now maddened beast with the
fiery muleta, mocking him, talking to him, even turning his back to
him--only to leap round and beside him in the wink of an eye when the
bull would have gored him to death. Young Gallito strokes his second
bull from head to mouth several times; Gaona lays his hat on the
animal’s horns, and carelessly removes it again; while Bombita, who is
veritable quicksilver, has his magnificent clothes torn to pieces but
remains himself unscratched in his breath-taking manœuvres with the
beast. Finally, with a swift gesture, he raises his arm, casts aside
the muleta, drives his sword straight and true between the shoulders of
his adversary. A shout goes up--wild as that of the Coliseum of old:
“Bombita! Bombita! _El matador--Bombita!_” And we know that the bull is
dead, but that Bombita, who has been teasing death, scoffing at it, for
the last twenty minutes, lives--triumphant.
And what is it all about? Atrocious cruelty, a bit of bravado, and
ecco! A hero! Exactly. Just as in the prize ring, the football field,
or an exhibition of jiu-jitsu. We pay to be shocked, terrified, and
finally thrilled; by that which we have neither the skill nor the
courage to attempt ourselves. But, you say, these other things are fair
sport--man to man; we Anglo-Saxons do not torture defenceless animals.
What about fox hunting? There is not even the dignity of danger in
the English sport; if the hunter risks his life, it is only as a bad
rider that he does so. And certainly the wretched foxes, fostered and
cared for solely for the purpose of being harried to death, are treated
to far more exquisite cruelty than the worn-out cab horses of the
bullfight--whose sufferings are a matter of a few minutes.
I am not defending the brutality of the bullfight; I merely maintain
that Anglo-Saxons have very little room to attack it from the
superiority of their own humaneness. And also that Spaniards themselves
are far from gloating over the sickening details of their sport as they
are often said to do. In every bullfight I have attended the crowd has
been impatient, even exasperated, if the horses were not killed at once
and the _picadors_ put out of the ring. We need not greater tolerance
of cruelty, but greater knowledge of fact, in the study and criticism
of things foreign to us.
I doubt, for instance, if any person who has not lived in Madrid
knows that every man who buys a ticket to the bullfight is paying
the hospital bill of some unfortunate; for the President of the Bull
Ring is taxed ten thousand pounds a year for his privilege, and the
government uses this money for the upkeep of charity hospitals.
One cannot say as much for the proceeds of the stupid sport of cock
fighting--nor anything in its favour at all. Patrons of the cockpit are
for the most part low-browed ruffians with coarse faces, and given to
loud clothes and tawdry jewellery. They stand up in their seats and
scream bets at one another during the entire performance, each trying
to find “takers” without missing a single incident of the contest. The
bedlam this creates can only be compared with the wheat pit in Chicago;
while to one’s own mind there is small sport in the banal encounter of
one feathered thing with another, however gallant the two may be.
More to the Anglo-Saxon taste is the Spanish game of _pelota_: a kind
of racquets, played in a three-sided oblong court about four times the
length of a racquet court. The fourth side of the court is open, with
seats and boxes arranged for spectators, and bookmakers walk along in
front, offering and taking wagers. At certain periods of the game there
is much excitement.
It is played two on a side--sometimes more--the lighter men about
halfway up the court, the stronger near the end. The ball used is
similar to a racquet ball and is played the long way of the court; but,
instead of a bat, the player has a basketwork scoop which fits tight on
his hand and forearm. The object of the game is for one side to serve
the ball against the opposite wall, and for the other side to return
it; so that the ball remains in play until a miss is scored by one of
the two sides. Should the side serving fail to return, the service
passes to the opponents. A miss scores one for the opponents, and the
game usually consists of fifty points. There are the usual rules about
fouls, false strokes, etc., but the fundamental principle consists in
receiving the ball in the scoop and whacking it against the opposite
wall. It sounds very simple, but the players show a marvellous agility
and great endurance, the play being so rapid that from the spectator’s
point of view it is keenly entertaining.
Of course the upper classes in Madrid play the usual tennis, croquet
and occasionally polo, but the Spaniard is not by instinct a sportsman.
Rather he is a gambler, which accounts for the increasing vogue for
horse racing in Madrid. The course, compared with Longchamps and Epsom,
is rather primitive and the sport to be had is as yet inferior to the
fashion and beauty to be seen. Intermissions are interminable--else
how could the ladies see each other’s frocks, or the gallants manage
their flirting? On the whole, the races in Spain are affairs of society
rather than of sport.
Riding is very seldom indulged in by ladies, and the men who canter up
and down the Castellana in the evening have atrocious seats and look
thoroughly incongruous with their handsome mounts. There is practically
no country life throughout Spain, the few families who own out-of-town
houses rarely visit them, and still more rarely entertain there. When
the upper class leaves Madrid it is for Biarritz or San Sebastian or
Pau--some resort where they may satisfy the Spaniard’s eternal craving:
to see and be seen. This explains why the Madrileño is maladroit at
those outdoor sports he sometimes likes to affect as part of his
Anglo-mania, but which he never really enjoys.
On the other hand, he adores what the French call the “_vie
d’intérieure_.” Nothing interests him, or his señora, more than their
day at home, which in Spanish resolves into a _tertulia_. No matter
what time of day this informal reception takes place, ladies appear
in morning dress--as the Anglo-Saxon understands the word--and visits
are paid by entire families, so that sometimes the onslaught is rather
formidable. Chocolate is served, about the consistency of oatmeal
porridge, but deliciously light and frothy nevertheless. It is eaten
instead of drunk, by means of little bits of toast, dipped into the
cup. Sometimes in the evening meringues are served, but always the
refreshments are of the simplest, the feast being one of chatter and
familiar gossip rather than of stodgy cakes and salads.
When there is dancing, no sitting out or staircase flirtations are
allowed; but, on the other hand, there is not the depressing row
of chaperones round the walls nor the bored young men blocking the
doorways during intermissions. Everyone gathers in little groups
and circles, the men keeping the stifling rooms in a constant haze
of smoke, and a wild hubbub of conversation goes on until the next
dance. The foreigner is disappointed in Spanish dancing. Having
in his mind the wonderful grace and litheness of the professional
_bailarina_, he is shocked by the hop-skip-and-jump waltzing he meets
with in drawing-rooms. The fact is that only in their own national or
characteristic local dances are the Spanish graceful; when they attempt
the modern steps of other countries, as when they attempt the clothes
and sports of other countries, they become ridiculous.
But, happily for the young people, they do not know it; and during
the ungainly waltz they make up in ardent flirtation for the loss of
the balconies, window seats and other corners _à deux_ beloved by
less formally trained youth. What goes on in the dance, _dueñas_ wink
at. After all, the chief business of Spanish life is to marry off the
children, and when the latter are inclined to help matters along so
much the better.
In passing, it may be of interest to add that, while the New Woman is
an unknown quantity in Spain, the Spanish woman is the only one who
retains her maiden name after marriage. Thus Señorita Fernandez becomes
Señora Fernandez de Blank, and her children go by the name of Blank _y
Fernandez_. Also, if she is a lady of rank, her husband immediately
assumes her title; and this last descends through the female line,
if there are no sons. Such a law forms an interesting vagary of the
country where woman’s position on the whole reflects the Oriental. In
Toledo there is a convent for the education of penniless daughters
of noblemen. Each of the young ladies is given a dowry of a thousand
dollars, and is eagerly sought in marriage as a person of importance.
All this in accordance with the Spanish tradition that there is no such
thing as an old maid.
Naturally, in a land thoroughly orthodox in both religion and social
conventions, divorce is _tabu_; the solution of the unhappy marriage
being intrigue--which is overlooked, or, at the worst, separation--in
which case the woman has rather a hard time of it. At best, she is
completely under the thumb of her husband, and would lose her head
altogether were she suddenly accorded the liberty of the American
woman, for example. I have often thought what a treasure one of these
unaggressive Españolas would make for the brow-beaten American man;
who, if he had a fancy to follow in the footsteps of his ambitious
sisters, might buy a wife and a title, and--by purchase of property
with a rental of ten thousand dollars--a life seat in the senate, all
at the same time!
And never, never again would he be seen with his hang-dog effacement,
shuffling into a restaurant as a sort of ambulant peg for the wraps of
a procession of ladies. Once a real Spaniard, he would stalk in first
at cafés, and find his own cronies, leaving madame to find hers in the
separate “section for señoras.” When he was ready to depart, she--no
matter what her fever to finish the gossip of the moment--would depart
without a murmur. Outrageous! cries the American, who pads his own
leading-strings with the pretty word of “chivalry.”
I think I have said that Spanish ladies do not attend restaurants,
except those of the larger hotels; but they are devoted to cafés,
where they eat chocolate and _tostas fritas_, or drink a curious--and
singularly good--mixture of lemon ice and beer, while shredding
the affairs of their neighbours. Owing to the segregation of the
masculine and feminine contingents, the Madrid café presents a quite
different picture from the _rendez-vous intime_ of the Parisian, or
the _gemütlich_ coffee house of Vienna. There is no surreptitious
holding of hands under the table, no laying of heads together over the
illustrated papers, no miniature orchestra playing a sensuous waltz.
The amusement of the _Madrileño_ in his favourite café is to look out
of it onto the street; of the _Madrileña_, ditto--each keeping up a
running fire of chatter the while.
The manners of both ladies and gentlemen are somewhat startling
at times. Toothpicks are constantly in evidence, some of the more
exclusive carrying their own little instruments of silver or gold, and
producing them from pocket or handbag whenever the occasion offers. It
is not uncommon, either, for ladies as well as gentlemen to expectorate
in public; in cafés, or even from carriages on the Castellana, one
sees this done with perfect _sang froid_. On the other hand, there is
an absolute simplicity and freedom from affectation. With all their
interest in the appearance and affairs of their neighbours, Spanish
men and women are without knowledge of the word “snob.” So thoroughly
grounded in that unconscious assurance newer civilization lacks, they
would not know how to set about “impressing” anyone. They are what they
are, and there’s an end to it.
When they stare, as the foreigner complains they do constantly, it is
the frankly direct stare of a child. And few ladies use pince-nez--for
which they have the excellent word, “_impertinentes_.” Some of these
Spanish words are delightfully descriptive: there is “_sabio-mucho_”
for the little donkeys that trot ahead of the mules in harness, and in
their careful picking of the way prove their title of “know-it-all.”
And there is _serreno_ for the night watchman, who prowls his district
every hour, to assure the inhabitants that “it is three o’clock and the
night serene!”
To the English night-owl, the custom of leaving one’s latchkey with the
_serreno_ appeals as rather precarious, in several ways. But Spaniards
are notoriously temperate; also discreet; and, as Spanish keys are apt
to weigh a pound or two, it is the easiest thing for the señor when he
reaches his own door to clap his hands twice--and the _serreno_ comes
running. It seems a quaint custom to have a night watchman in a city
like Madrid, where life goes on all night, and the Puerta del Sol is as
full and as noisy at half-past three in the morning as at the same hour
of the afternoon.
All the best amusements begin very late, following the rule of
the nine-o’clock dinner; and as theatre tickets are purchased in
sections--_i. e._, for each separate act or piece--it is generally
arranged so that the finest part of a performance begins at half
after ten, or even eleven o’clock. Of course, the Teatro Real, or
opera-house, is the first theatre of Madrid, and we have already spoken
of the sacrifices endured for the privilege of owning a box for the
season.
Ladies of society--and some who are not--delight to receive in their
_palcos_; and the long entr’actes lend themselves to actual visits,
instead of the casual “looking in” of friends. Anyone, by paying the
nominal entrance fee, can enter the opera house--or any theatre--on the
chance of finding acquaintances in the boxes, and so spend an hour or
two going from one group to another. This gives the house the look of a
vast reception, which it is, far more than a place where people come to
hear good music.
It has not, however, the brilliancy or fascination of the Metropolitan
audience in New York, nor of Covent Garden. The Teatro Real is a
mediocre building, in the first place; and neither the toilettes and
jewels of the women nor the distinction of the men can compare with the
splendid _ensemble_ of an English or American opera audience. While
the music, after Vienna, is execrable, and merits the indifference
the _Madrileños_ show it. About the most interesting episode of the
evening comes after the performance is over--when, on the pretext of
waiting for carriages, society lingers in the entrance hall, chatting,
laughing, engaged in more or less mild flirtation--for the better
part of an hour. Here one sees the _Madrileña_ at her best; eyes
flashing, jewels sparkling, fan swaying back and forth to show or
again to conceal her brave “best gown”; above all, smiling her slow
Eastern woman’s smile with a grace that makes one echo her adorers’
exclamation: “At your feet, señora!”
She is seen to less advantage at the ordinary theatre, which is usually
in itself a dingy affair, and where evening dress is conspicuous by its
absence. Even the orchestra is apt to come garbed in faded shades of
the popular green or brown, and always with hats on--until the curtain
rises.
We have spoken already of the prevalence of the one-act play in Spanish
theatres. The people pay an average charge of two _reales_--ten
cents--for each small piece, and the audience changes several times
during an evening. At the better theatres, orchestra seats are
seventy-five cents--a price to be paid only by the very wealthy!--and
the plays are generally unadulterated melodrama. The always capricious
audience cheers or hisses in true old melodramatic fashion, so that
at the most touching moment of a piece one cannot hear a word of it,
for the piercing _Bravos_--or again catch the drift of the popular
displeasure which shows itself in groans and whistling. The complete
_naïveté_ of the Spanish character is nowhere better displayed than at
the theatre; but I think it must keep the actors in a constant fever of
suspense.
The latter are rather primitive in method and appearance according
to modern notions, but play their particular _genre_ with no small
cleverness. They use little or no make-up, so that the effect at
first is rather ghastly; however, one gets used to it, and even comes
to prefer it to the over-rouged cheeks and exaggerated eyes of the
Anglo-Saxon artist. It is interesting, too, that, even in the world of
make-believe, the Spaniard is as little make-believe as possible. There
is nothing artificial in his composition, and even when professionally
“pretending” he pretends along the line of his own strong loves and
hates, with no attempt at subtilizing, either.
One is apt to think there is no subtlety at all in this people--until
one sees its national dancers. After the banal “Boston” and one-step
of the ultra-moderns, the old ever-beloved Spanish dances come as
a revelation; while the professional _bailarina_ herself is as far
removed from her kind in other lands as poetry from doggerel.
Tall, swayingly slender, delicately sensuous in every move, she glides
into vision in her ankle-long full skirts, like a flower rising from
its calyx. There is about her none of the self-consciousness of the
familiar lady of tarletans and tights; but a little air of dignity
on guard that is very alluring. She does not smirk, she does not
pirouette; she sways, and bends, and rises to stamp her foot in the
typical _bozneo_, with a litheness and grace indescribable. And her
castanets! Long before she actually appears, you hear their quick
_toc-toc_: first a low murmur, then louder and ever louder, till with
her proud entrance they beat a tempestuous allegro--only to grow
fainter and fainter and die away again with the slow measures of the
dance.
Her long princess frock sheathes the slim figure closely, to swell out,
however, at the ankles in a swirl of foamy flounces. Brilliant with
sequins or the multi-coloured broidery of the _mantón_, the costume
curls about her in a gorgeous haze of orange, azure, mauve, and scarlet
while she dances. Her fine long feet are arched and curved into a
thousand different poses; her body the mere casing for a spirit of
flame and mystery; her face the shadow curtain of infinite expression,
infinite light.
And while her castanets are sounding every shade of rhythm and
seduction, and her white long arms are swaying to and fro--in the
ancient _Jota_, or the _Olé Andaluz_, or perhaps in the _Sevillana_, or
the _Malagueña_--the dance of her particular city; while men’s throats
grow hoarse with shouting _bravos_ and women’s eyes dim with staring
at such grace, there lives before one not La Goya, La Argentina,
Pastora Impéria--not the idol favourite of the hour, but something more
wonderful and less substantial: the ghost of old Spain. It flits before
one there, in its proud glory; its beauty, its passion, and its power;
baring the soul of half of it--the woman soul, that is.
And when one looks beyond her fire and lovely dignity, over her
shoulder peers the cool, dark face of a _torero_.
[Illustration: A TYPICAL POSTURE OF THE SPANISH DANCE]
III
ONE OF HIS “BIG SCENES”
Twenty-eight years ago Alfonso XII died, leaving a consort whom the
Spanish people regarded with suspicion, if not with actual dislike. She
was Maria Christina of Austria, the second wife of the king; and six
months after his death her son, Alfonso XIII, was born.
Sullenly Spain submitted to the long regency of a “foreigner”; and
Maria Christina set about the desperate business of saving her son to
manhood. From the first he was an ailing, sickly child, and his mother
had to fight for him in health as well as in political position every
inch of the way. She was tireless, dauntless, throughout the struggle.
Time after time the little king’s life was despaired of; she never gave
up.
Every morning during his childhood the boy was driven to the bracing
park of La Granja, where he ate his lunch and stayed all day, only
coming back to Madrid to sleep. In this and a hundred other ways it
was as though his mother, with her steel courage, literally forbade
him to die. And today, for her reward, she has not only a king whom
the entire world admires with enthusiasm, but a son whose devotion to
herself amounts almost to a passion.
I like to remember my first glimpse of the king--it was so
characteristic of his personal simplicity in the midst of a court
renowned for its rigid ceremonial. I was one of the crowd that lined
the Palace galleries on a Sunday before Public Chapel; we were herded
between rows of halberdiers, very stiff and hushed, waiting for the
splendid procession soon to come.
Suddenly the cry rose: “_El Rey!_” And, attended only by two gentlemen
and a grey-haired lady in black, the king came down the corridor. He
was in striking blue uniform, and wore the collar of the Golden Fleece,
but what occurred to one first was his buoyant look of youth and his
smile--as the Spaniards say, “very, very _simpatico_.” He saluted to
the right and left, skimming the faces of the crowd with that alertness
that makes every peasant sure to the end of his days that the king
certainly saw _him_. Then he stooped while one of his gentlemen held
open a little door much too low for him, and slipped quickly through to
the other side. “Exactly,” murmured an old woman disappointedly, “like
anyone else.”
That is a large part of the greatness of this king, as it was of that
of Edward VII of England: he is exactly like anyone else. And, like
anyone else, he must submit to a routine and certain obligatory duties
which are utterly irksome to him. When he came back from Chapel later,
in the tedious procession, his face was quite pale and he looked tired
out. With all his mother’s indefatigable care and training, his health
at best is very irregular; and I remember hearing one of his guards say
that he would have died long ago if he could have taken time for it!
But to go back to Royal Chapel: on the days when this is public,
anyone, beginning with the raggedest peasant, may walk into the Palace
and upstairs to the galleries, as though he were a prince of the blood.
True, if he arrives early he must stand in line, to be moved along as
the guards shall direct. But if he comes, as I did, just before the
hour, he walks upstairs and along the thick-carpeted corridors, to take
his place where he chooses. Of course one is literally barricaded by
halberdiers--two of them to every three persons, as a rule--and a very
imposing line they make in their scarlet coats, white knee breeches and
black gaiters, their halberds glittering round the four sides of the
galleries.
These are hung, on one or two gala Sundays a year, with marvellous old
tapestries, so that not an inch of stone wall can be seen. It makes
a beautiful background for the gold lace and rich uniforms of the
grandees as they pass through on their way to the Assembly Chamber. For
half an hour before the procession forms, these gorgeous personages are
arriving, many of them in the handsome court costume of black, finely
worked in gold embroidery, and with the picturesque lace ruff. Others
wear various and splendid uniforms, with--as many as have them--ribbons
of special orders, and, of course, every medal they can produce,
strung across their chests. Some of the older men are particularly
distinguished, while all the officers stalk in, in the grand manner,
shoulders square, swords clanking.
An especially interesting group is the Estada Mayor--six grandees out
of the seven hundred odd who wear a gold key over their right hip, as
a sign that they may enter the palace and confer with the sovereign at
any time. These men have the title of Marqué in addition to any others
they may have inherited, and are supposed to spend one week each in
the palace during the year. They are tall, splendid-looking creatures,
in bright red coats, white trousers with black boots, and helmets with
waving white feathers. And on Public Chapel days they enter last into
the Assembly Chamber, so that their appearance is the signal that the
procession is about to start.
When they have gone in, the chief of the halberdiers cries: “The King!
Do me the favour to uncover your heads!” And the favour is done, while
detectives all about are taking a final sharp survey of the closely
guarded crowd. Then two plainly dressed persons, known by the modest
title of _bandero_ (sweeper) hurry up and down the line to make sure
no presumptuous subject has his feet on the royal carpet; and finally
two ancient major domos in scarlet breeches and much gold lace solemnly
march several yards ahead of the procession, peering searchingly from
right to left. For, as everyone knows, the King of Spain’s life is in
momentary danger from anarchists, and no amount of precaution ever
really satisfies the inquietude of his people when he is in public.
At last the dignified line of grandees appears. Some of them we
recognize as they go by: The Duke of Medina y Cœli, with his
twenty-eight titles, the most of any noble in Spain; the Duke of
Alba, who holds the oldest title, and the head of whose family always
registers a formal protest on the accession of each king--with the
insinuation, of course, that by right of birth the Alba should reign.
Further on come the three royal princes, Don Carlos, Don Fernando,
and Don Alphonso--the King’s cousin. And finally, between his two
_gentilhombres_, the King.
It is not the boyish young man now, slipping inconspicuously from one
room to another, but the sovereign, erect and on duty, facing his
rows of scrutinizing subjects steadily and with a quiet confidence. I
should like more than most things to have a true picture of him at that
moment--walking unself-consciously in the midst of his haughty court. On
all sides of him pomp and stateliness: the lovely old tapestries, the
rich shrines at every corner of the galleries, the brilliant uniforms
of the tall halberdiers, the dazzling garb of the grandees, and the
flashing jewels of their ladies: among all this magnificence the King
walked with truest dignity, yet utterly _sans façon_. He had even,
behind the gravity due the occasion, the hint of a twinkle in his eye,
as though to say, “It’s absurd, isn’t it, that all this is for me? That
a plain man who likes to ride, and to shoot, and to prowl round in the
forest with his dogs should be the centre of this procession as King
of Spain! Really, it’s almost a joke.”
I’m sure he actually was thinking that, for he has a delightful sense
of humour, besides being wholly natural, and he and the Queen are noted
for their simplicity and their readiness to be considered as ordinary
humans. The King, in walking to and from Chapel, passes close enough
to the people for any one of them to reach out and touch him, and his
alert eyes seem to convey, with his frank smile, individual greeting to
each person present. No one can look even once into that ugly, animated
face without feeling both the magnetism and the tremendous courage with
which Alfonso XIII rules Spain.
On this morning that I saw him the Queen was not present; but she
usually walks with him to Chapel, and is extravagantly admired by the
people, who find her blond beauty “_hermosisima_” (the most lovely)
and her French gowns the last word of elegance. Both she and the
Queen-mother reached the Chapel by an inner entrance on the day of
which I speak; so that the Infantas Isabel and Maria Luisa with their
ladies followed the King.
[Illustration:
_L. R. Marin_
THE ROYAL FAMILY OF SPAIN, AFTER A CHAPEL SERVICE
(_Left to right._) 1. Infanta Isabel. 2. The King. 3. Prince of
Asturias. 4. Infanta Maria Luisa. 5. Don Alfonso. 6. Don Carlos. 7. Don
Fernando. 8. The Queen Mother. 9. Princess Henry of Battenberg. (Third
from the right in the front row is the favourite little Prince Jaimé).]
Doña Isabel, with her strong, humorous face, and white hair, is always
an interesting figure. She is constantly seen at the bullfight, and
driving through the Puerta del Sol or in the Castellana; and is
generally wearing the mantilla. This morning she wore a very beautiful
white one, held by magnificent diamond clasps, and falling over a
brocade dress of great richness. Her train, carried by a Marqués of
the household, was of white satin embroidered in iris, and clusters
of the flower were scattered over the stuff itself.
The Infanta Maria Luisa, who is considered one of the most beautiful
of all princesses, was also in white satin and a white mantilla, and
looked exceedingly Spanish and attractive. She had wonderful jewels, a
string of immense pearls being among the most prominent; and a great
emerald cabochon that hung from a slender chain. Each of the Infantas
had her lady-in-waiting, also in court trains and the mantilla; and
one could not help reflecting how much more picturesque and becoming
this latter is than the stiff three feathers prescribed by the English
tradition. On the other hand, it is true that only Spanish ladies know
how to wear the gracious folds of lace which on women of other nations
appear incongruous and even awkward.
After the Infantas and their ladies came the diplomats and various
foreign ambassadors, all in full regalia; and finally the six officers
of the Estada Mayor brought up the rear. I have forgotten to mention
the band of the Palace Guards which preceded the entire procession,
and played the royal march all this while. I think there can be no
music at once so grave and so inspiring as this is; if it thrills the
imagination of the foreigner, what must it mean to the Spaniard with
his memories?
When the court had passed into the Chapel, the crowd was at liberty to
break ranks and walk about the galleries. During this intermission, the
detectives were again in evidence; scouring the place for any signs of
violence. Since the King was fired at, on the day of the swearing-in of
the recruits (April 13, 1913), efforts to protect his life have been
redoubled. This was the third attack since his marriage, including the
terrible episode of his wedding-day itself.
On that occasion, when the bomb that was thrown at him, as he was
leaving the church with the Queen, killed thirty-four people besides
the horses of the royal coach, and caused the Queen’s wedding-dress to
be spattered with blood, the poor bride in her terror was on the point
of collapsing. Through the babel of screams and shouting, the King
spoke to her distinctly: “The Queen of Spain never faints!” said he.
And he placed her in another carriage, and drove off, coolly, as though
nothing had happened.
[Illustration:
_L. R. Marin_
KING ALPHONSO SWEARING IN THE RECRUITS ON THE DAY OF THE ATTEMPT ON HIS
LIFE (APRIL 13, 1913)]
Again, at the time of the attack last April, the King was the first to
see the man rushing towards him, pistol uplifted. Instantly he started
forward, on his horse, to ride down the assassin; and when the shots
rang out, and people realized what was happening, the King was the
first to reach his would-be murderer, and to protect him from the mob.
Then the crowd forgot the criminal, and went mad over the sovereign.
Spaniards themselves say that never has there been such a demonstration
for any monarch in the history of Madrid. One can imagine the tingling
pride of those recruits who, when the confusion was past, had still to
go through the impressive ceremony of kissing the cross made by their
sword against the flag: what it must have meant to swear allegiance
to such a man at such a moment. As I heard a young girl say, at the
time: “There is just one adjective that describes him: he’s _royal_,
through and through.”
He looked more than ever royal when, coming back from Chapel, he
knelt head bared before the shrine at our end of the gallery. All the
procession now carried lighted candles, and their number was increased
by the bishop and richly clad priests who had conducted service. At
each of the four shrines they halted, while prayers were sung; and one
was struck with the opportunity this offered for an attack upon the
King. As he knelt there, head lowered between the two lines of people,
he made an excellent mark for the anarchist’s pistol; but, as usual,
seemed utterly unconscious of his danger.
The court, on its knees, looked very bored; and made no pretence at
devoutness while the beautiful _Aves_ were being sung. But the King
played his part to the end, with a dignity rather touching in such a
frankly boyish man; though, when the ceremony was over, he heaved a
very natural sigh of relief as he rose to his feet again.
Back stalked the “sweepers,” the old major-domos, the haughty grandees;
back came Don Carlos, Don Fernando, Don Alfonso. And then, for the
fourth time that morning so near us, the King; smiling, with his first
finger on his helmet, in the familiar gesture. The Infantas followed
him, then the diplomats; finally the six nobles of Estada Mayor. The
chief of the halberdiers pounded on the floor with his halberd; the
guards broke ranks; the people surged out of line and towards the
stairs--and Royal Chapel was ended.
Yet not quite, for me. Thanks to a friend in the Estada Mayor, I had
still to see one of the finest pictures of the morning: the exit from
the palace, of the famous Palace Guards. Six abreast they came, down
the grand staircase of the beautiful inner court, two hundred strong as
they filed out to their solemn bugle and drum. All of them men between
six and seven feet, in their brilliant red and black and white uniform,
I shall never forget the sight they made, filling the splendid royal
stairs. They seemed the living incarnation of the old Spanish spirit;
the spirit of Isabella’s time, but none the less of that heroic woman
of today who, though not of Spanish blood herself, has given to Spain a
king to glory in and revere.
IV
HIS FOIBLES AND FINENESSES
“The salient trait of the Spanish character,” says Taine, “is a lack
of the sense of the practical.” For want of it, Ferdinand and Isabella
themselves--the greatest rulers Spain ever had--drove the Moors and
the Jews out of the country; and laid the cornerstone of its ruin.
Far from realizing they were expelling by the hundred thousand their
most wealthy and intelligent subjects, the Catholic sovereigns saw
only the immediate religious triumph; the immediate financial gain of
confiscating the estates of the infidels, and refusing to harbour them
within their realm.
Time after time, the blind arrogance of the Spaniard as champion of
orthodoxy throughout the world, has rebounded against him in blows from
which he will never recover. The Inquisition in itself established an
hereditary fear of personal thinking that remains the stumbling-block
in the way of Spanish progress to this day. Too, the natural indolence
of the people inclines them to accept without question the statements
and standards handed down from their directors in Church or State.
Some of these are so absurd as to call for pity rather than
exasperation on the part of outsiders. For example, the conviction of
even educated Spaniards with regard to the recent war with the United
States is that the latter won because they sent out every man they had;
while Spain was too indifferent to the petty issues involved to go to
the expense of mustering troops! Half the nation has no idea what those
issues were, nor of the outcome of the various battles fought over
them; indeed, so distorted were the accounts of the newspapers and the
governmental reports that Admiral Cervera was welcomed home to Spain
with as much enthusiasm, if not as much ceremony, as was Admiral Dewey
to America!
The few insignificant changes in the map, resulting from that war, the
Spaniard tells you seriously, came from foul play on the part of “_los
Yankees_.” That the stubborn ignorance and meagre resources of his own
countrymen had anything to do with it he would scout with utter scorn.
And this, not from a real and intense spirit of patriotism, but because
he is forever looking back over his shoulder at the glories of the
past; until they are actually in his mind the facts of the present.
There is little intelligent patriotism throughout Spain, the local
partisan spirit of old feudalism taking its place. Thus Castilians
look down on Andalucians; Andalucians show a bland pity for Aragonese;
Catalonians hate and are hated by every other tribe in the country;
while the Basques coolly continue to this day to declare that they are
not Spaniards, but a race unto themselves.
The extraordinary oath with which they accept each king, on his
accession, is luminous: “We who are as good as you, and who are more
powerful than you, elect you king, that you may protect our rights
and liberties.” It scarcely expresses a loyalty with which to cement
provinces into a united kingdom! But it must be remembered that
the monarchs of the past have made a scare-crow of loyalty, with
their draining wars for personal aggrandizement, and the terrible
persecutions of their religious bigotry. The people themselves are
far from being to blame for their lack of patriotism, or the mediæval
superstition which with them takes the place of intelligent faith.
Catholics of other countries are revolted by what they see in their
churches in Spain. The shrine of one famous Virgin is hung with
wax models of arms and legs, purchased by devotees praying relief
from suffering in these members. Childless women have added to the
collection small wax dolls; also braids of their own hair, sacrificed
to hang in the gruesome row beside the altar. Looking at these things,
hearing the fantastic stories told (and firmly believed) about them,
one can with difficulty realize that one is in a Christian country of
the twentieth century.
On the other hand, there is a respect shown religion, and the
mysteries of life and death, which is impressive in this callous age
of materialism. Spanish women invariably cross themselves when passing
a church--whether on foot or in a tram or carriage; and every man,
grandee or peasant, uncovers while a funeral procession goes by. I
have noticed this especially on days of the big bull-fights, when the
trams are packed to the doors; not a man, whatever his excitement over
the approaching _corrida_, or his momentary interest in his neighbour,
omits the instinctive gesture of respect when a hearse passes.
Which, alas, it does very often in Madrid; pathetically often, bearing
the small casket of a child. It is said that a Spaniard, once grown to
maturity, lives forever; but the mothers consider themselves fortunate
if they save only half of their many children to manhood or womanhood.
This is so literally true that one woman who had had sixteen said to
me quite triumphantly, “and eight are alive! And my sister, who had
fourteen, now has seven.”
One has not to search far for the cause of this terrible mortality. In
the first place, it is a case of inbreeding; no new blood having come
into the country since the Jews and Moors left it. In the second, the
simplest laws of personal or public hygiene are unheard-of. Even among
the lower middle class, for a mother to nurse her child is a disgrace
not to be endured; and the peasant women to whom this duty is entrusted
are appallingly ignorant, and often of filthy personal habits. From
its birth, a baby is given everything it cries for--or is supposed to
cry for; including cheese, pieces of meat with rice, oranges, fried
potatoes, and sweetmeats of every description.
This applies not only to the poorer classes but to people of supposed
education and enlightenment. When the child is two or three years
old, it comes to the table with the family; though the hours of
Spanish meals are injudicious even for grown persons. The early cup of
chocolate is had generally about ten or eleven; luncheon is at half
after one, dinner between half after eight and nine. When this is
over, the parents take the children to walk in the streets, or to the
stifling air and lurid entertainment of the cinema. They all go to bed
about midnight, or later; and the parents cannot understand why, under
such a régime, the children should have the nerves and waxen whiteness
of little old men and women. Until I went to Spain, I had always
considered the French child the most ill-treated in the world; but I
now look upon his upbringing as positively model, compared with the
ignorance and hygienic outrage visited upon the poor little _español_.
Yet no people love their children more passionately, or sacrifice for
them more heroically, than do the Spaniards. It is simply that in the
laws of health, as in everything, their conception is that of by-gone
centuries. In railway carriages, trams, restaurants and cafés they sit
through the hottest months of summer with every door and window tight
shut. More than once on the train, I have been obliged to stand in
the corridor all day, because my five carriage-companions insisted on
sealing themselves for ten hours or more within an airless compartment
eight feet square. Even in their own carriages on the Castellana, the
Madrileños drive up and down in the months of July and August with the
windows entirely closed.
One does not wonder at their being a pale and listless race, attacked
by all manner of disease.
It must be remembered throughout this discussion that we are dealing
with the general mass of the people; though with the mass drawn from
all classes. There is in Madrid the same ultra-smart set (augmented
largely by wealthy South Americans), the same set of _littérateurs_ and
artists, the same set of charming and distinguished cosmopolitans, that
one finds in every big city. But, in the Spanish capital, these shining
exceptions are so far in the minority as to have very limited power to
leaven the mental stodginess of society as a whole.
The King and Queen, by their open fondness for foreigners, and (quite
naturally) for the English in particular, have set the fashion for
the Anglo-mania that rules a certain portion of the aristocracy. As
in Paris, a number of English words are currently used, but with a
pronunciation apt to make the polite Anglo-Saxon’s lip twitch at times.
The “Boy Scoots,” for example, are a favourite topic of conversation
in progressive drawing-rooms; while the young bloods are wont to
declare themselves, eagerly, keen for good “spor” and “the unt.” In
the English Tea Rooms--always crowded with Spaniards--I have even been
gravely corrected for my pronunciation of “scones.” “The señora means
_thconais_,” says the little waiter, in gentle Castilian.
Many _Madrileños_ affect English tailoring, though the results are
a bit startling as a rule. Brown and green, in their most emphatic
shades, vie with one another for popularity; and checks or stripes seen
on a Spanish Brummel _are_ checks or stripes--no indecision on the part
of the pattern. Women, of course, lean to Paris for their fashions; but
Paris is too subtle for them, and they copy her creations in colours
frankly strident. Orange and cerise, bright blue and royal purple share
the señora’s favour; while, to be really an _élégante_, her hair must
be tinted yellow, her face a somewhat ghastly white.
An interesting variation of conventional feminine standards is this
tendency of the chic _Madrileña_ to appear like a French cocotte; while
the women of the demi-monde themselves are demurely garbed in black,
without make-up, without pretension of any sort. But all women, to be
desirable, must be fat. Not merely plump, as Anglo-Saxons understand
the word, but distinctly on the ample side of _embonpoint_. The only
obesity cures in Spain are for men; women, including actresses,
professional beauties, and even dancers, live to put on flesh.
One explanation of this curious and, to our taste, most unæsthetic
idea of feminine beauty is its being another of those relics of
Orientalism--constantly cropping up in the study of the Spanish
character. I often wonder, when I see a slender Spanish girl, if she
will ever be driven to the extremity of the “Slim Princess” of musical
comedy fame; who, when all else failed, filled her frock with bolsters,
and her cheeks with marshmallows, and then--unfortunately--sneezed.
If you told that story to a Madrileño, he would answer seriously, “Oh,
but no Spanish girl would ever think of such a foolish thing.” I am
sure, on second thoughts, that she would not. That is, in fact, of all
Spanish faults the gravest: they never, never think of foolish things.
Only the King dares laugh at himself, and at the weighty affairs of
his family. Last year, just after the publication of the memoirs of
a certain royal lady of the house, and the high scandal that ensued,
a new little infanta was born. In presenting her to his ministers on
the traditional gold platter, the King said with his dry grin: “I have
already told her she is never to write a book!”
Speaking generally, however, the Spanish sense of humour is not
over-acute. I doubt, for instance, if any other people could solemnly
arrange and carry out a bullfight for the benefit of the S. P. C.
A. Yet this actually occurred in Madrid a few years ago; and, the
Madrileños will tell you with much pride, though the seats were much
dearer than at other bull-fights, _every one_ was filled by some patron
of the noble cause!
Like all people of prodigious dignity, the old actor never sees the
funny side of his own performance. He will go off into gales of
laughter over the mere shape of a foreigner’s hat; but, himself,
says and does the most absurd things without the slightest jolt to
his personal soberness. An English lady in Madrid told me of a case
in point: she was visiting one of the unique foundling-convents of
Spain, where superfluous babies may be placed in an open basket in the
convent wall; the bell that is rung swinging the basket inside at the
same time. My friend was trying to learn more of this highly practical
institution, but the nuns whom she questioned were so overwhelmed with
amusement at her boots, they could only look at her and giggle.
Finally, in despair, she concluded, “Well, at least tell me how many
children are brought to you a year!”
By supreme effort, one of the sisters recovered her gravity. “We
receive about half a baby a day, señora,” she said, sedately, and could
not understand why the lady smiled!
That continual rudeness in the matter of staring and laughing at
strangers was at first a great surprise to me--who had always heard of
the extravagant politeness of the Spaniard. I came to know that he is
polite only along circumscribed lines--until he knows you. After that,
I believe that you could take him at the literal words of his lavish
offers, and burn his house or dismantle it entirely without protest
on his part. Though too poor to invite you to a meal, he will call at
your hotel twice a day to leave flowers from his garden, and declare
himself at your disposition; or to take you to drive in the Castellana.
He will go to any amount of trouble to prepare small surprises for you:
a box of sweets, that he has made especially; a bit of majolica he has
heard you admire; an old fan that is an heirloom of his family: every
day there is something new, some further token of his friendship and
thought.
It is true that, even when able to afford it, he shows an Eastern
exclusiveness about inviting you to his house. I know people who have
lived in Madrid seventeen years without having been once inside the
doors of some of their Spanish friends. But this is racial habit:
the old Oriental tradition of the home being sacred to the family
itself: not personal slight, or snobbishness. There is in it, however,
a certain caution which offends the franker hospitality of the
Anglo-Saxon. To go into petty detail, I for one have never been able to
overcome my resentment of the brass peep-holes (in every Spanish door)
through which the servant peers out at you, before he will let you in.
I realize that my irritation is quite as childish as their precaution;
but I cannot conquer my annoyance at the plain impudence of the thing.
The same is true of their boundless interest in one’s
affairs. Peasants, shop-keepers, well-dressed ladies and
gentlemen--everyone!--will gather round, to hear a simple question
addressed to a policeman in the street. They take it for granted that
no foreigner speaks Spanish, and when the contrary proves the case,
their curiosity and amazement are increased ten-fold.
I was once in the office of a French typewriter company of Madrid,
arranging to rent a machine. During the intervals in which the agent
and I conversed in French he discussed my requirements, appearance, and
probable profession with a postman, a delivery-boy, an officer who
came in to buy pens, and the two young lady stenographers in the next
room. In Spanish, of course, all this; which I, as a foreigner, could
not possibly understand.
This happens over and over again, especially at _pension_ tables,
where one gleans astounding information as to the geography and
customs of one’s country (from various good Spaniards who have never
left their own), until a modest request for the salt--proffered in
Castilian--throws the entire company into horrified confusion. Even
then, they will go on to comment most candidly to one’s face on the
peculiarities and generally inferior character of one’s countrymen.
But if you turn the tables ever so discreetly, they retort in triumph:
“Then why have you come to Spain? If your own country pleases you, why
don’t you stay there?”
Travel for amusement or education is simply outside their
comprehension--naturally enough, since it is outside the possibilities
of most of them today as it was in the middle ages. We have already
seen their ideas of other countries to be of the most naïve. I have
been seriously congratulated by Madrileños on the privilege of
beholding so fine a thoroughfare as the Castellana, such splendid shops
as the handful scattered along the San Geronimo, such a wonderful
building as the Opera House, which they fondly believe “the most
beautiful in the world.” They are generously delighted for me, that
after the primitive hotels I must have known in other countries I can
enjoy for a while the magnificence of their modern “Palace.”
They, alas, are too poor to enjoy it. I think there is something
almost tragic in this fact that the entire society of Madrid cannot
support the very moderate charges of the one first class hotel in
the city. When one thinks of the dozens of luxurious stopping-places
in London, New York, and Paris--always crowded by a mob of vulgar
people with their purses overflowing, it seems actually cruel that the
_vieille noblesse_ of the Spanish capital have no money for the simple
establishment they admire with child-like extravagance. The old actor
does so delight in pomp--of even the mildest variety; and his youthful
shortsightedness has left him so pitiably unable to secure it, now in
the beggardom of his old age.
Half a dozen years ago, the porter of a friend of mine in Madrid won
a lottery prize of ten thousand dollars. No sooner had he come into
this fabulous wealth, than he and his wife proceeded to rent a house
on the Castellana, a box at the opera, another at the bull-ring; and
of course the indispensable carriage and pair. The señor had his clubs
and racers, the señora her jewels, and frocks from Paris; they amazed
Madrid with their magnificence.
At the end of six months the ten thousand dollars were gone; and the
couple went back to the porter’s lodge, where they have lived happily
ever since. Could one make the last assertion of two people of any
other race in the same circumstances? Certainly not of two Americans!
But, of course, had they been Americans, they would promptly have
invested the ten thousand dollars, and doubled it; in five years they
would probably have been “millionaires from the West.” Not so the
ingenuous Spaniards. With no thought for the morrow, they proceeded to
outdo all competitors in making a gorgeous today; and, when that was
done, retired without bitterness to rest on their laurels.
In all of which the good couple may have been wiser than they seem.
Being true children of their race--that is, without the first instincts
for “making money”--they would naturally have taken what they had won,
and stretched it carefully over the remaining half century of their
lives. So they could have existed in genteel poverty without working.
As it was, they had their fling--such a one as to set Madrid by the
ears; they are still famous for their unparalleled prodigality; and
they jog along in the service to which they were born, utterly content
if at the end of the day they have an hour or two in which to gloat
over their one-time splendour. When I think of the enforced scrimping
and soul-shrivelling calculation of the average Madrileño, I am always
glad to remember two who threw their bonnets over the mill, and had
what Americans call “one grand good time.”
It is impossible to conclude this cursory glance at some of the more
striking of Spanish characteristics without mention of the two finest:
honesty and lack of self-interest. They go hand in hand throughout this
country of rock-rooted impulse, and are forever surprising one used to
the modern rule of look-sharp-or-be-worsted. My first shock was in the
Rastro (the old Thieves’ Market of Madrid), when an old man candidly
informed me that the chain I admired was not of gold. It had every
appearance of gold, and I should have bought it as such; but the shabby
old salesman shook his head, and gave it to me gladly for twenty cents.
As Taine tells us, the Spanish are not practical; which endows them,
among other things, with the unprofitable quality of honour. In Toledo,
just as I was taking the train, I discovered that I had lost my watch.
It occurred to me that I might have dropped it in the cab our party
had had for a long drive that afternoon; but when the hotel proprietor
telephoned to the stables, he found that the cab had not yet returned.
“However,” he told me confidently, “tomorrow the _cosaria_ goes to
Madrid, and if the watch is found she can bring it to you.”
The _cosaria_ (literally the “thing” woman) is an institution peculiar
to Spain; she goes from town to town delivering parcels, produce, and
what not--in short, she is the express company. Of course I never
expected to see my watch again, but before six o’clock of the following
day the _cosaria_ appeared at my door in Madrid with the article lost
in Toledo--seventy miles away. The charge for her services was two
pesetas (forty cents). When I suggested a reward for the coachman, she
replied with amazement that it would be to insult him! I have visions
of an American driver running risk of such “insult.” He would have
been at the pawnshop, and got his ten dollars long since.
An American friend of mine who conducts a school for girls in Madrid
tells of a still rarer experience. One day her butcher came to her in
great distress. He had been going over his books, and he found that the
price his assistant had been charging the school for soup-bones (daily
delivered) was twice what it should have been. This, said he with
abject regret, had been going on unknown to him since the first of the
year; he therefore owed the señora nine hundred pesetas (one hundred
and eighty dollars) for bones, and begged her to accept this sum on the
spot, together with his profoundest apologies.
I call such experiences rare, yet they are of everyday occurrence
in Spain; so that one knows it was not here that Byron said: “I
never trust manners, for I once had my pocket picked by the civilest
gentleman I ever met with!” In Spain, manners and morals have an
original habit of walking out together; and one need not, as in other
countries, fear a preponderance of the former as probable preclusion of
the latter. That lack of the practical sense, which we wise analysts
deplore, has its engaging side when it brings back our watch, or saves
us paying a gold price for brass.
In the matter of servants, too, one is allured by a startling readiness
on their part to do as much as, even more than, they are paid for.
After the surly thanks and sour looks of the New York or London menial
for anything under a quarter, the broad smile of the Spanish for five
cents is quite an episode in one’s life. The breath-taking part of it
is that the smile is still forthcoming when the five cents is not; this
is frightfully disturbing to one’s nicely arranged opinions of the
domestic class.
But it makes living in Madrid very agreeable. Like the rest of
their countrymen, servants before they know you are inclined to be
suspicious, and polite only along circumscribed lines, but once they
have accepted you your position in their eyes is unimpeachable, and the
service they will render has no limits. This standard of judgment of
a very old country: the standard, throughout all classes, of judgment
of the individual for what he proves himself to be, is extremely
interesting as opposed to the instantaneous judgment and unquestioning
acceptance of him as he outwardly appears to be by the very young
country of America. To the American it is a disgrace to serve--or, at
least, to admit that he is serving; to the Spaniard it is a disgrace
not to serve, with his utmost powers and grace, anyone worthy of
recognition whatsoever.
Wherefore Spanish maids and men are the most loyal and devoted the
world over. They will run their feet off for you all day long, and
sit up half the night too if you will let them, finishing some task
in which they are interested. When you are ill, they make the most
thoughtful of nurses, never sparing themselves if it is to give you
even a fractional amount of comfort. And to all your thanks they return
a deprecating “for nothing--for nothing.” They have never heard of “an
eight-hour day”; the Union of Domestic Labour would be to them a title
in Chinese; yet they find life worth living. They are even--breathe
it not among the moderns!--contented; still more strange, they are
considered, and whenever possible spared, by their unmodern masters and
mistresses.
It is the civilization of an unpractical people; a people not in terror
of giving something for nothing, but eager always to give more. They
are, I believe, the one people to whom money--in the human relations
of life--never occurs. And so, of course, they are despised by other
peoples--for their poverty, their lack of “push.” Nowadays we worship
the genius of Up-To-Date: his marvellous invention, his lightning
calculation and keen move; his sweating, struggling, superman’s
performance, day by day--and his final triumph. We disdain the old
actor of mere grandiloquence, content to dream, passive in his corner.
Yet are his childishness and self-sufficiency, even his ignorance, so
much meaner than the greed and sordidness and treachery of the demigod
of today? And is the inexorable activity of the modern “Napoleon of
finance” so surely worth more than the attitude of the shabby old man
who refused to sell brass for gold?
V
IN REVIEW
(London)
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
“THE RESTFUL SWEEP OF PARKS”]
I
THE CRITICS
Coming into London from Paris or New York, or even from Madrid, is like
alighting from a brilliant panoramic railway onto solid, unpretentious
mother earth. The massive bulk of bridges, the serene stateliness of
ancient towers and spires, the restful green sweep of park--unbroken
by flower-beds or too many trees; the quiet leisure of the Mall, and
the sedate brown palace overlooking it: all is tranquil, dignified,
soothing. One leans against the cushions of one’s beautifully luxurious
taxi, and sighs profound contentment. Here is order, well-being, peace!
And yonder, typical of it all, as the _midinette_ is typical of Paris
and the _torero_ of Spain, stands the imperturbable London “bobby.”
Already you have met his Southampton or Dover cousin on the pier; where
the latter’s calm, competent orders made the usual flurried transfer
from boat to train a simple matter. Too, you have made acquaintance
with that policeman-in-embryo, the English porter. His brisk, capable
answers: “Yes, sir. This way, please sir. Seven-twenty at Victoria,
right, sir!”: and his deft piloting of you and your luggage into the
haven of an empty carriage--in these days of frenzied democracy,
whence can one derive such exotic comfort as from a servant who
acknowledges himself a servant, and performs his servant’s duties to
perfection?
I used to wonder why travelling in England is so much more agreeable
than travelling in America, with all the conveniences the latter
boasts. I think it is because, where America gives you things to make
you comfortable, England gives you people--a host of them, well trained
and intent only on serving you. The personal contact makes all the
difference, with one’s flattered vanity. The policeman, the porter,
the guard who finds one a seat, the boy who brings one a tea-basket,
finally the chauffeur who drives one to an hotel and the doorman who
grasps one’s bag: each and all tacitly insinuate that they exist to
look out for oneself in particular, for all men in general. What wonder
that Englishmen are snobs? Their universe revolves round them, is made
for as well as by them; and what they want, when they want it, is
always within arm’s reach. They are the inventors and perfectors of the
Groove.
But no one can accuse them of being sybarites. Comfort, luxury, the
elaborate service with which they insist on being surrounded are only
accessory to a root-idea which may even be called a passion: the
producing of great men. To this, as to all great creation, routine
is necessary; and the careful systematizing of life into classes and
sub-classes, each with its special duties. English people actually
love their duties, they are taught from childhood to love them; and
to attend to them before everything. As reward, when work is finished,
they have the manifold pleasures of home. This is odd indeed, to the
American or European--to whom duty is a dreary thing, to be avoided
whenever possible; and home a place to leave, in search of pleasure,
not to come back to. In consequence, the general summary of England is:
“dull.”
English people are called dull--“heavy” is the more popular
word--because they do not gather on street-corners or in cafés, arguing
and gesticulating, but go methodically about their business; leaving
the stranger to do the same. Of course, if the latter has no business,
this is depressing. Here he is in an unknown country, with nothing to
do but sight-see, which bores him infinitely. There is no one with whom
to talk, no pleasant congregating-spot where he could at least look
on at, if not share in, the life of the people. He is thrown dismally
back upon himself for diversion. So what does he do? He goes and sees
the sights, which was his duty from the beginning. Just as he goes
to bed at midnight because every place except bed is closed against
him; and to church on Sundays because every building except church is
shut. England not only expects every man to do his duty, she makes
it practically impossible for him to do anything else; by which she
shrewdly gains his maximum efficiency when and where she needs it.
In return, or rather in preparation, she gives him a remarkably fine
groundwork, both mental and physical, to start with. No foreigner
can fail to be impressed with the minute care and thought bestowed
upon English children, and the sacrifices gladly made to secure
their health and best development. In comparison with French and
American and Spanish parents, the English mother and father may seem
undemonstrative, even cold; they do not gush over their children in
public, nor take them out to restaurants, or permit them to share
their own meals at home. Neither, however, do they give them the least
comfortable rooms in the house, and decree that their wants and needs
shall be second to those of the adult members of the family. The
children have a routine of their own, constructed carefully for them,
and studied to fit their changing requirements. They have their own
rooms--as large and light and sunny as the parents can contrive--their
own meals, of wholesome food served at sensible hours; their fixed time
for exercise and study alike: everything is planned to give them the
best possible start for mind and body.
“But,” the French or American mother objects, when one extols this
system, “it takes so much money; so many rooms, so many servants--two
distinct households, in fact.” It takes a different distribution of
money, that is all. As the children are never on show, their clothes
are simple; the clothes of the parents are apt to be simple too.
Amusement is not sought outside the home in England, as it is in other
countries; both interest and money are centred within the house and
garden that is each man’s castle. This makes possible many comforts
which people of other countries look upon as luxuries, but which to
the Englishman and woman are the first necessities. And primary among
these is a healthful, cheerful place to rear their children.
Not only the wealthy, but people in very modest circumstances insist
upon this; and in houses of but six or seven rooms one finds the
largest and airiest given over to the day and night nurseries for
the children. Fresh chintz and white paint and simple furniture make
these the most attractive as well as most sensible surroundings for
the small people. Nurses, teachers, school-fellows, the whole chain
of influence linking the development of the English child, emphasize
the idea of physical fitness as a first essential. And this idea is so
early instilled, and so constantly and emphatically fostered, that it
becomes the kernel of the grown man’s activity. The stern creed that
only the fit survive rules England almost as it ruled old Sparta: a
creed terrible for the weak, but splendid for the strong; and that has
produced such men as Gordon, Rhodes, Kitchener, Curzon and Roberts--and
hundreds of others, the fruit of this rigorous policy.
First the home, then the public schools teach it. At school, a boy must
establish himself by his proven prowess in one direction or another. To
gain a footing, and then to hold it, he must do something--row, or play
cricket or football; but play, and play hard, he must. The other boys
force him to it, whether he will or no; hardness is their religion, and
those who do not conform to it are practically finished before they
begin. The reputation won at school lays or permanently fails to lay
the foundation of after success. “Hm ... yes, I remember him at Eton,”
has summarized many a man’s chances for promotion or failure. Rarely
does he prove himself to be worth later more than he was worth then.
It is interesting to follow the primitive ideal, of bodily perfection,
throughout this old and perhaps most finely developed civilization of
the present. In the hurry-scurry of modern affairs, when other men pay
little or no heed to preserving their bodily strength, never does this
cease to be the first consideration of the Englishman. He wants money
and position and power quite as keenly as other men want them; but he
has been born and reared in the knowledge that to gain these things,
then to enjoy them, sound nerves are necessary. His impulse is to store
up energy faster than he spends it, and not to waste himself on a
series of trifles someone else can do as well if not better than he.
Hence the carefully ordered routine he follows from childhood; the
systematic exercise, the frequent holidays his strenuous American
cousin scoffs at. All are designed to keep him hard and fit, and ready
for emergencies that may demand surplus strength. Middle-aged men play
the game and follow the hobbies of young men; the elderly vie with the
middle-aged. In England, the fast and fixed lines that divide youth
from maturity are blurred by the hearty good comradeship of sport; in
which all ages and classes share alike. Sport is not a hobby with the
Englishman; it is the backbone of his existence. Therefore, I think,
it is so hard for the foreigner to enter into the real sports spirit
of England: he never quite appreciates the vital motive behind it.
With the Frenchman and the American and the Spaniard--even with the
Austrian--sport is recreation; they take it apart from the business of
life, where the Englishman takes it as essential to life itself. By it
he establishes and maintains his working efficiency, and without it he
would have lost his chief tool, and his perennial remedy for whatever
ills befall him.
Obviously, it is this demand for physical perfection that underlies
and engenders the national worship of race; and that is responsible,
in the last analysis, for the renowned snobbishness of the English.
Someone has said that English Society revolves round the King and the
horse--or, as he might have added, round the supreme symbols of human
and animal development. That towards which everyone is striving--to
breed finer and stronger creatures--is crystallized in these two
superlative types. While from the King down, on the human side, the
scale is divided into the most minute shades of gradation.
As government in England tends to become more and more democratic,
society tends to become more aristocratic--as far as magnifying ancient
names and privileges is concerned. “A title is always a title,” said a
practical American lady, “but an English title is just a bit better.”
It is, because English people think so, and have thought it so long
and so emphatically that they have brought everyone else to that
opinion. The same is true of many English institutions, admirable in
themselves but which actually are admired because the English admire
them. Every nation is more or less egoist, but none is so sincerely and
consistently egoist as the English. They travel the earth, but they
travel to observe and criticize; not to assimilate foreign things.
The American is a chameleon, taking on the habits and ideas of each
place as he lives in it; Latins have not a little of this character
too. But the Briton, wherever he goes, remains the Briton: you
never mistake him, in Palestine or Alaska or the South Sea Islands:
no matter where he is, he has brought his tea and his tub and his
point of view with him. And, though he may be one among thousands
of another nationality, somehow these others become impressed with
his traditions rather than he with theirs. Perhaps because away from
home, he calmly pursues the home routine, adjusting the life of his
temporary habitation to himself, rather than himself to it. If he is
accustomed to dress for dinner, he dresses; though the rest of the
company may appear in corduroys and neckerchiefs. And continues to
dress, imperturbably, no matter how mercilessly he may be ridiculed or
even despised. If he is accustomed to take tea at a certain hour, he
takes it--in Brazil or Thibet, it makes no difference. And the same is
true of his religious observance, his beloved exercise, his hobbies and
his study: of all these things he is too firmly convinced to change
them by one jot. Such an attitude is bound to have its effect on these
persistently confronted with it; resentment, then curiosity, finally
a certain grudging respect is born in the minds of the people on whom
the Englishman serenely forces his superiority. They wonder about his
country--he never sounds its praises or urges them to visit it. He
simply speaks with complete contentment of “going home.”
When the foreigner, often out of very _pique_, follows him thither, he
is met with the same indifference shown him in his own land. Visiting
strangers may come or go: while they are in England, they are treated
with civility; when they choose to depart, they are not pressed to
remain. This tranquil self-sufficiency is galling to the majority,
who go away to sulk, and to denounce the English as a race of “dull
snobs.” Yet they come back again--and again; and continue to hammer at
the door labelled “British Reserve,” and to be snubbed, and to swallow
their pride and begin anew, until finally they pry their way in by
sheer obstinacy--and because no one cares very much, after all, whether
they are in or not. London is so vast and so diverse, in its social
ramifications, it can admit thousands of aliens a year and remain quite
unconscious of them.
Americans in particular are quick to realize this, and, out of their
natural arrogance, bitterly to resent it. At home they explain rather
piteously, they are “someone”; here, their money is accepted, but they
themselves are despised--or, at best, barely tolerated. They who are
used to carry all before them find themselves patronized, smiled at
indulgently--or, worst of all, ignored. In short, the inexperienced
young actors come before an audience of seasoned critics, whom they
cannot persuade to take them seriously. For they soon discover that
there is no “bluffing” these calmly judicial people, but that merit
alone--of one sort or another--succeeds with them.
They are not to be “impressed” by tales of reckless expenditure
or intimate allusions to grand dukes and princesses seen on the
promenades of Continental “cures.” On the contrary, they are won
over in no time by something the American would never think of using
as a wedge--unaffected simplicity. But why should one want to win
them--whether one be American or French, Spanish, German, or any other
self-respecting egoist-on-one’s-own? Why does one always want to win
the critical?
Because they set a standard. The English have set standards since
ever they were at all: wise standards, foolish standards, some broad
and finely tolerant, others absurdly narrow and short-sighted. But
always they live by strict established rule, to which they demand of
themselves exacting conformity. Each class has its individual ten
commandments--as is possible where classes are so definitely graded and
set apart; each man is born to obey the decalogue of his class--or to
be destroyed. Practically limitless personal liberty is his, within the
laws of his particular section of society; but let him once overstep
these, and he soon finds himself in gaol of one kind or another.
Foreigners feel all this, and respond to it; just as they respond to
the French criterion of beauty, the American criterion of wealth.
England for centuries has stood for the _précieux_ of society, in the
large significance of the term; before her unwavering ideal of race,
other people voluntarily come to be judged for distinction, as they
go to Paris to be judged for their artistic quality, to New York for
their powers of accomplishment. Today more than ever, London confers
the social diploma of the world which makes it, of course, the world’s
Mecca and chief meeting-place.
This has completely changed the character of the conservative old city,
from a provincial insular capital into a great cosmopolitan centre.
Necessarily it has leavened the traditional British self-satisfaction,
while that colossus slept, by the introduction of new principles, new
problems, new points of view. The critic remains the critic, but he
must march with the times--or lose his station. And conservatism is a
dotard nowadays. Each new republic, as it comes along, shoves the old
man a foot further towards his grave. Expansion is the battle-cry of
the present, and critics and actors alike must look alive, and modulate
their voices to the chorus.
A bewildering babel of tunes is the natural result in this transition
period, but many of them are fine and all are interesting. England
lifts her voice to announce that she is not an island but an Empire;
and it is the fashion in London now to treat Colonials with civility,
even actually to fête them. _Autre temps, autre mœurs!_ We have heard
Mr. Bernard Shaw’s charwoman ask her famous daughter of the Halls:
“But what’ll his duchess mother be thinkin’ if the dook marries a
ballyrina, with me for a mother-in-law!” And the answer: “Indeed, she
says she’s glad he’ll have somebody to pay his income tax, when it goes
to twenty shillings in the pound!”
The outcry against American peeresses and musical comedy marchionesses
has long since died into a murmur, and a feeble murmur at that. Since
another astute playwright suggested that the race of Vere de Vere might
be distinctly improved by the infusion of some healthy vulgar blood,
and a chin or two amongst them, the aristocratic gates have opened
almost eagerly to receive these alien beauties. In politics, too,
new blood is welcomed; as it is in the Church, in the universities,
and even in that haughtiest of citadels, the county. The egoism of
England is becoming a more practical egoism: she is beginning to see
where she can use the things she has hitherto disdained, and is almost
pathetically anxious to make up for lost time. But, for ballast, she
has always her uncompromising standards, by which both things and
people must be weighed and found good, before being accepted.
In short, while the bugaboo of invasion and the more serious menace
of Socialism have grown up to lead pessimists to predict ruin for the
country, subtler influences have been at work to make her greater than
ever before. The signs of conflict are almost always hopeful signs;
only stagnation spells ruin. And where once the English delighted to
stagnate--or at least to sit within their insular shell and admire
themselves without qualification--now they are looking keenly about,
to acquire useful men and methods from every possible source. Finding,
a bit to their own surprise, that, rather than diminishing their
prestige in the process, they are strengthening it.
The routine is being amplified, made to fit the spirit of the time,
which is a spirit of progress above all things. John Bull has
evolved from a hard-riding, hard-drinking, provincial squire into a
keen-thinking tactician with cosmopolitan tendencies and breadth of
view. From London as his reviewing-stand, he scrutinizes the nations as
they pass; and his judgment--but that is for another chapter.
II
THE JUDGMENT
“Now learn what morals critics ought to show,
“For ’tis but half a judge’s task to know,”
says Pope, who himself was hopelessly immoral in the manufacture
of couplets. And what two men ever agreed on morality, anyhow? The
personal equation is never more prominent than in the expression of
the “individual’s views,” as nowadays ethics are dubbed. One may fancy
oneself the most catholic of judges, yet one constantly betrays the
hereditary prejudices that can be modified but never quite cast off.
I was recently with an Englishman at an outdoor variety theatre in
Madrid. We sat restively through the miserable, third-rate performance,
grumbling at each number as it proved worse than the last, and
finally waxing positively indignant over the ear-splitting trills and
outrageous contortions of the prima donna of the evening. “Still,” said
the Englishman suddenly, “she _has_ had the energy to keep herself fit,
and to come out here and do something. Really, she isn’t so bad, you
know, after all.”
Before she had finished, he was actually approving of her: her
mere physical soundness had conquered him, and her adherence to his
elemental creed of “doing something” and doing it with all one’s might.
The artistic and the sentimental viewpoints, which the Englishman
always wears self-consciously, slip away from him like gossamer when
even the most indirect appeal is made to his fetish of physical
fitness. In respect of this, he is by no means a snob, but a true
democrat.
As a matter of fact, there are many breaks in the haughty traditional
armour. It is in New York, not London, that one hears severe discussion
of A’s charwoman grandmother, B’s lady’s maid mother, C’s father
who deals in tinned beans. What London wants to know is what A, B,
and C do; and how they do it. Snobbism turns its searchlight on
the individual, not on his forbears; though to the individual it
is merciless enough. In consequence, the city has become a sort of
international Athenæum, a clearing-ground for the theories, dreams and
fanaticisms of all men.
I remember being tremendously impressed, at my very first London
tea-party, by the respect and keen interest shown each of the various
enthusiasts gathered there. A Labour leader, a disciple of Buddhism,
the founder of a new kind of dramatic school, a missionary from the
Congo and a Post-Impressionist painter: all were listened to, in turn,
and their several hobbies received with lively attention. The Labour
leader got a good deal of counter-argument, the Post-Impressionist his
share of good-humoured chaffing; but everyone was given the floor, and
a chance to beat his particular drum as hard as he liked, until the
next came on.
The essential thing, in London, is that one shall have a drum to beat;
small talk, and the polite platitudes that sway the social reunions
of New York and Paris, are relegated to the very youthful or the very
dull. Nor is cleverness greeted with the raised eyebrow of dismay;
people are not afraid, or too lazy, to think. One sees that in the
newspapers, the books and plays, as well as in the drawing-room
conversation of the English. The serious, even the so-called heavy,
topics, as well as the subtle, finely ironic, and sharply critical, are
given place and attention; not by a few _précieux_ alone, but by the
mass of the people. And not to be well informed is to be out of the
world, for both men and women.
Of course, there is the usual set of “smart” fashionables who delight
in ignorance and whose languid energies are spent between clothes
and the newest one-step. But these are no more typical of London
society than they are of any other; though in the minds of many
intelligent foreigners they have become so, through having their doings
conspicuously chronicled in foreign newspapers and by undiscriminating
visitors returning from England. On one point, this confusion of
English social sets is easily understood: they share the same moral
leniency that permits all to lend themselves to situations and ideas
which scandalize the foreigner.
It is not that as a people they are more vicious than any other,
but they are franker in their vice; they have no fine shades. An
American woman told me of the shock she received at her first English
house-party, where her hostess--a friend of years, who had several
times visited her in New York--knew scarcely one-half of her own
guests. The rest were “friends,” without whom nothing would induce
certain ladies and gentlemen to come.
“It wasn’t the _fact_ of it,” said the _Américaine_, candidly; “of
course such things exist everywhere, but they aren’t so baldly apparent
and certainly they aren’t discussed. Those people actually quarrelled
about the arrangement of rooms, and changed about with the most
bare-faced openness. My hostess and I were the only ones who didn’t
pair, and we were simply regarded as hypocrites without the courage of
our desires.”
All of which is perfectly true, and an everyday occurrence in English
social life. The higher up the scale, the broader tolerance becomes.
“Depend upon it,” said a lady of the old régime, “God Almighty thinks
twice before he condemns persons of quality!” And, in England, mere
human beings, to be on the safe side, do not condemn them at all. The
middle-class (the sentimentalists of every nation) lead a life of
severe rectitude--and revel in the sins of their betters, which they
invent if the latter have none. But directly a man is a gentlemen, or
a woman a lady, everything is allowable. Personal freedom within the
class laws holds good among morals as among manners; and the result is
rather horrifying to the stranger.
French people, for example, are far more shocked at the English than
the English are at them. With the former, the offense is against good
taste--always a worse crime, in Latin eyes, than any mere breach of
ethics. The Englishman’s unvarnished candour in airing his private
affairs appears to the Latin as crass and unnecessary; while in the
Englishwoman it becomes to him positively repellent. The difference,
throughout, in the two races, is the difference between the masculine
and the feminine points of view. England is ever and always a man’s
country. Even the women look at things through the masculine vision,
and to an extent share the masculine prerogatives. As long as a woman’s
husband accepts what she does, everyone accepts her; which explains how
in the country where women are clamouring most frantically for equal
privileges, a great number of women enjoy privileges unheard of by
their “free” sisters of other lands.
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
LONDON, THE EMPIRE CAPITAL]
It is a question of position, not of sex; and harks back--moral
privilege, I mean--to that core of all English institutions: breeding.
There are no bounds to the latitude allowed the great, though it does
not seem to occur to the non-great that such license in itself brings
into question the rights of many who hold old names and ancient titles.
Succession, that all-important factor of the whole social system, is
hedged about with many an interrogation point; which society is pleased
to ignore, nevertheless, on the ground of _noblesse oblige_! Above a
certain stratum, the English calmly dispense with logic, and bestow
divine rights on all men alike; obviously it is the only thing to
do, and besides it confers divine obligations at the same time.
One must say for all Englishmen that rarely if ever, in their personal
liberty, do they lose sight of their obligations. In the midst of
after-dinner hilarity, one will see a club-room empty as if by magic,
and the members hurry away in taxis or their own limousines. One
knows that a division is to be called for, and that it wants perhaps
ten minutes of the hour. The same thing happens at balls or almost
any social function: the men never fail to attend when they can, for
they are distinctly social creatures; but they keep a quiet eye on
the clock, and slip out when duty calls them elsewhere. This serves
two excellent purposes: of preventing brain-fag among the “big” men
of the hour, and leading the zest of their interests and often great
undertakings to society--which in many countries never sees them.
In England politics and society are far more closely allied than in
America or on the Continent. Each takes colour from the other, and
becomes more significant thereby. The fact of a person’s being born
to great wealth and position, instead of turning him into an idle
spendthrift, compels his taking an important part in the affairs of the
country. The average English peer is about as hard-working a man as
can be found, unless it be the King himself; and the average English
hostess, far from being a butterfly of pleasure, has a round of duties
as exacting as those of the Prime Minister. Through all the delightful
superficial intercourse of a London season, there is an undercurrent
of serious purpose, felt and shared by everyone, though by each one
differently.
At luncheons, dinners, garden-parties and receptions the talk veers
sooner or later towards politics and national affairs. All “sets,” the
fashionable, the artistic, the sporting, the adventurous, as well as
the politicians themselves, meet and become absorbed in last night’s
debate or the Bill to come up for its third reading tomorrow. By the
way, for a foreigner to participate in these bouts of keen discussion,
he must become addicted to the national habit: before going anywhere,
he must read the Times.
As regularly as he takes his early cup of tea, every self-respecting
Englishman after breakfast retires into a corner with the Times, and
never emerges until he has masticated the last paragraph. Then and
only then is he ready to go forth for the day, properly equipped
to do battle. And he speedily discovers if you are not similarly
prepared--and beats you. Of all the characteristic English things I
can think of, none is so English as the Times. In it you find, besides
full reports of political proceedings and the usual births, marriages,
and deaths, letters from Englishmen all the way from Halifax to
Singapore. Letters on the incapacity of American servants, the best
method of breeding Angora cats, the water system of the Javanese (have
they any?), how to travel comfortably in Cochin China, the abominable
manners of German policemen, the dangers of eating lettuce in
Palestine, etc., etc. Signals are raised to all Englishmen everywhere,
warning them what to do and what to leave undone, and how they shall
accomplish both. Column upon column of the conservative old newspaper
is devoted to this sort of correspondence club, which has for its motto
that English classic: prevention, to avoid necessity for cure.
The Englishman at home reads it all, carefully, together with the
answers to the correspondents of yesterday, the interminable speech of
Lord X in the Upper House last night, the latest bulletins concerning
the health of the Duchess of Y. It is solid, unsensational mental food,
and he digests it thoroughly; storing it away for practical future use.
But the foreigner, accustomed to the high seasoning of journalistic
epigram and the tang of scandal, finds it very dull. Unfortunately, the
mission of the newspaper in most countries has become the promoting of
a certain group of men, or a certain party, or a certain cause, and
the damning of every other man or party or cause that stands in the
way. The English press has none of this flavour. It is imbued with the
national instinct for fair play, which, while it by no means prohibits
lively discussion of men and measures, remains strictly impersonal in
its attitude of attack.
The critic on the whole is inclined to deserve his title as it was
originally defined; one who judges impartially, according to merit. He
is a critic of men and affairs, however, rather than of art. He lives
too much in the open to give himself extensively to artistic study
or creation. And Englishmen have, generally speaking, distinguished
themselves as fighters, explorers, soldiers of fortune, and as
organizers and statesmen, rather than as musicians, painters, and men
of letters.
Especially in the present day is this true. There are the Scots and
Shackletons, the Kitcheners, Roberts, and Curzons; but where are
the Merediths, Brownings, Turners, and Gainsboroughs? Literature is
rather better off than the other arts--there is an occasional Wells or
Bennett among the host of the merely talented and painstaking; more
than an occasional novelist among the host of fictioneers. But poets
are few and uneventful, playwrights more abundant though tinged with
the charlatanism of the age; while as for the painters, sculptors and
composers, in other countries the protagonists of the peculiar violence
and revolution of today--in England, who are they?
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
THE GREAT ISLAND SITE]
We go to exhibitions by the dozen, during the season, and listen
conscientiously to the latest tenor; but seldom do we see art or
hear music. In the past, the great English artists have been those
who painted portraits, landscapes, or animals; reproducing out of
experience the men and women, horses, dogs, and out-of-doors they knew
so well; rather than creating out of imagination dramatic scenes and
pictures of the struggle and splendour of life. Their art has been
a peaceful art, the complement rather than the mirror of the heroic
militancy that always has dominated English activity. Similarly, the
musicians--the few that have existed--have surpassed in compositions
of the sober, stately order, oratorios, chorals, hymns and solemn
marches. Obviously, peace and solemnity are incongruous with the
restless, rushing spirit of today, to which the Englishman is victim
together with all men, but which, with his slower articulation, he is
not able to express on canvas or in chromatics.
Cubism terrifies him; on the other hand he is, for the moment at least,
insanely intrigued by ragtime. The hoary ballad, which “Mr. Percy
Periwell will sing this day at Southsea Pier,” is giving way at last
to syncopated ditties which form a mere accompaniment to the reigning
passion for jigging. No one has time to listen to singing; everyone
must keep moving, as fast and furiously as he can. There is a spice of
tragi-comedy in watching the mad wave hit sedate old London, sweeping
her off her feet and into a maze of frantically risqué contortions.
Court edicts, the indignation of conservative dowagers, the severity of
bishops and the press--nothing can stop her; from Cabinet ministers to
house-maids, from débutantes to duchesses, “everybody’s doing it,” with
vim if not with grace. And such is the craze for dancing, morning, noon
and night, that every other room one enters has the aspect of a _salle
de bal_--chairs and sofas stiff against the walls, a piano at one end,
and, for the rest, shining parquetry.
Looking in at one of these desecrated drawing-rooms, where at the
moment a peer of the realm was teaching a marchioness to turkey-trot,
a lady of the old order wished to know “What, _what_ would Queen
Victoria say?”
“Madam,” replied her escort, also of the epoch of square dances and
the genteel crinoline, “the late Queen was above all things else a
gentlewoman. She had no language with which to describe the present
civilization!”
It is not a pretty civilization, surely; it is even in many ways a
profane one. Yet in its very profanities there is a force, a tremendous
and splendid vitality, that in the essence of it must bring about
unheard-of and glorious things. Our sentimentalism rebels against
motor-buses in Park Lane, honking taxis eliminating the discreet hansom
of more leisurely years; we await with mingled awe and horror the day
just dawning, when the sky itself will be cluttered with whizzing,
whirring vehicles. But give us the chance to go back and be rid of
these things--who would do it?
[Illustration:
_Underwood & Underwood_
LINKING THE NEW ERA AND THE OLD]
As a matter of fact, we have long since crossed from the sentimental
to the practical. We are desperately, fanatically practical in these
days; we want all we can get, and as an afterthought hope that it will
benefit us when we get it. England has caught the spirit less rapidly
than many of the nations, but she has caught it. No longer does she
smile superciliously at her colonies; she wants all that they can give
her. Far from ignoring them, she is using every scheme to get in touch;
witness the Island Site and the colonial offices fast going up on that
great tract of land beyond Kingsway. No longer does she sniff at her
American cousins, but anxiously looks to their support in the slack
summer season, and has everything marked with dollar-signs beforehand!
Since the Entente Cordiale, too, she throws wide her doors to her
neighbours from over the Channel: let everyone come, who in any way can
aid the old island kingdom to realize its new ideal of a great Empire
federation.
Doctor Johnson’s assertion that “all foreigners are mostly fools,”
may have been the opinion of Doctor Johnson’s day; it is out-of-date
in the present. English standards are as exacting, English judgments
as strict, as ever they were; but to those who measure up to them,
whatever their race or previous history, generous appreciation is
given. And I know of no land where the reformer, the scientist, the
philosopher--the man with a message of any kind--is granted fairer
hearing or more just reward; always provided his wares are trade-marked
genuine.
“Nonsense of enthusiasts is very different from nonsense of ninnies,”
was the conclusion of one of the wisest Englishmen who ever lived. And
the critical country has adopted it as a slogan; writing across the
reverse side of her banner: “Freedom and fair play for all men.”
THE END
Transcriber’s Notes
Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they
were not changed.
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be “America”.
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