Chapter II: Part 2

All these gentlemen, to be sure, seem to have objected to the fact and purpose of feminine adornment, rather than to rapid changes in the methods adopted. But I cannot believe that St. Paul, who scored the Attic curiosity born of the Attic _ennui_, would not have preached even more violently, had he foreseen the need, against fashion than against beauty. And is it not fashion rather than beauty that is subtly discriminated against by all religious orders? The nun, like the Quakeress, must adopt a single color and a single mode; though nun and Quakeress, both, often find their chosen garb the most becoming they could possibly wear. No dress could be more beautiful than that which I remember from my childhood’s convent. It fell in rich and simple folds of _violet_--_violet_ being neither purple nor crimson, but something indefinably magnificent midway between--enhanced by white linen _guimpe_ and cream-colored veiling. It gave the daughter of a French duke, I remember, the aspect of a queen regnant. Yet it represented poverty, chastity, and obedience. No one is especially concerned with the nun’s being unbecomingly clad. A subtler mortification is supposed to lie in her engaging to dress in exactly the same way all her life. The mortification is of course heightened by the fact that she shares her style of dress with the rest of the community, regardless of type. But in any case the first thing that the postulant renounces is fashionable clothing. They leave her curls to be cut off later.

It is not, however, with the moral aspect of fashion that I am concerned. The moral question, indeed, has ceased to be very poignant; even our Calvinist great-grandmothers permitted a shy predominance of trimming on the “congregation side” of their bonnets. The moral aspect of fashion disguises itself nowadays as an economic consideration. With economic considerations, again, I have no special concern. They are writ large over half the printed pages of our time. Some statistician every month proves to us something appalling: either that,

... since our women must walk gay, and money buys their gear,

materials are adulterated, or sewing-women are starved, or shop-girls seek the primrose path, or husbands die of the strain in their early forties. To much the same music, the New York Customs officials stage, each day, an elaborate melodrama on the steamship piers. We know that, from “Nearseal” to “Near-silk,” the poor will sacrifice comfort to cut, and that a really “good” milliner makes a profit of a hundred per cent on each hat. These things are all true; and Heaven forbid that one should shirk the economic question! But I very much doubt if either moralist or statistician will turn the trick. Yet they have only, it would seem, to enlist a few other facts as good as their own, to be quite sure of success.

For not even the cynic will pretend that the real object of fashions is to disfigure. It is quite without intention that M. Worth and Mme. Paquin and all their prototypes, congeners, and successors, have become the foes of beauty. They have simply never stopped to consider that the very notion of the changing mode is the negation of all aesthetic law. The most damning thing about fashions is that they make inevitably, nine years out of ten, for the greatest ugliness of the greatest number. And this is the real Achilles tendon of _la mode_. Can anything be more absurd than to impose a single style on the fat and the thin, on the minimum wage and the maximum income?

I admit that no fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker’s ideal is undoubtedly the thin millionairess. But the fat woman and the lean purse must make the best of each style in turn, as it comes along. And if one has ever seen a fat woman in (for example) a hobble skirt--even in an academic edition of a hobble skirt--one knows that this is not a light thing to say. As for the lean purse, it is not only in alarmist articles that the working-girl goes without half her luncheons to buy a rhinestone sunburst. One has known the cases. Nor is the coercion purely psychological. The cheapest Eighth Avenue suit, which, ready-made, costs something-and-ninety-eight cents, is sure to be a hasty and sleazy imitation (at many removes, and losing something with each) of a Fifth Avenue model. It is one of the few true paradoxes that people who must dress cheaply must dress “in style.” And that is a hard fate for the hypothetical poor woman with intelligence, who secretly desires a garment that will be no more conspicuous next year than this, and longs to put some of her money into good materials. It is only a very good (and expensive) dressmaker whose handiwork can both elude the exaggerations of the present fashion and foreshadow the essentials of the next. That is another thing that every woman knows.

The hypothetical poor woman with intelligence must content herself with looking a travesty on the successful chorus-girl. This, unfortunately, she comes only too easily to do. “But,” some one might object, “the poor woman is precisely an economic, not an æsthetic consideration.” Granted: yet since we must all dress, why not invent dresses that are widely adaptable--to different materials, to different occasions, to different human types? It would purge our streets of many a sorry and sordid spectacle, and in that sense would be an æsthetic service both particular and public. But, as it is, we must all dress alike: _blonde_ and _brune_, fat and thin, tall and short, rich and poor. The socialists have threatened us with no more rigid sisterhood than this.

The principle of fashion is, as I have intimated, the principle of the kaleidoscope. A new year can only bring us a new combination of the same elements; and about once in so often we go back and begin over. Recently we have had rather a Napoleonic tendency. Occasionally we are Colonial. We have been known to be Japanese. Now and then we have a severe classic moment--usually very unbecoming to all of us. We used to hear from our grandmothers of silk dresses that could “stand alone.” What we need now is a silk dress that could somehow manage to run.

There is no reward, in the world of woman’s dress, for a successful experiment. The most charming design in the world has no future. One is seldom tempted to apostrophize a fashion with, “Verweile doch! du bist so schön!”; but if one were, the adjuration would be as vain as ever. And that is another sin against beauty, for it deprives a woman of the privilege of dressing as best becomes her. There is something peculiarly bitter in watching the superseding of a mode that wholly suits one. Now and then a woman confides to me her intention of keeping to some style that is especially adapted to her. “It suits me, and I am going to stick to it,” she declares. She has found that it makes the most of all her “points”; it has given her, perhaps, renewed respect for her appearance and fresh zest for life. Such a woman is always, I believe, sincerely congratulated by her friends. They do not imitate her, but they really and unmaliciously envy her her point of view. She is proud of herself, and keeps to her decision for--say--a year. I never knew a woman to try such an experiment longer. She finds herself invariably conspicuous--and no well-bred woman likes to be unnecessarily conspicuous. For modesty’s sake she must adopt the extravagance of the moment. Otherwise, she discovers herself to be not rational but “queer,” and her attempt at wisdom to be the worst of affectations. It may be ironic that a woman who looks best in the mode of the Empress Josephine should be forced to dress _en chinoise_; but it is more than ironic when she has to dress _en chinoise_ one year and _en grecque_ the next. I have once or twice known elderly women who achieved something like a fixed costume for themselves; but they were semi-invalids. The consistent costume is, like the nun’s habit, the best possible proof of having renounced the world.

And into what pits do the great _couturières_ not fall in the search for something “new” enough to destroy the eligibility of all last year’s frocks! I never knew what ladies patronized, a few years since, the London woman who invented “emotional dressmaking”; but I can testify to having seen, in a show-window of one of the largest department stores in America, a model from her--is not the word “atelier”? A large group of plain women were gathered, staring at it. I joined the group and read the legend. The name of the dress was “Passion’s Thrall.” At least, as the White Knight said, “that was what the name was _called_.” Within the shop, in the spirit of curiosity, I followed a similar group to the “department” where such things live. Again, the emotional dressmaker. Isolated in a glass drawing-room, stood two draped figures: “Her Dear Desire,” and “Afterwards.” I could have imagined some one’s buying “Her Dear Desire”--it was of sad-colored chiffon. But I could not imagine any one’s buying “Afterwards”; and it was inconceivable that the name should help to sell it. I am bound to say that eventually I found myself alone in the contemplation of this sartorial drama. The crowd had followed a living model who was illustrating the possibility and method of walking in the new “Paquin skirt.” The gravity of every one concerned was unbelievable. Mr. Granville Barker has done some admirable satire on dressmaking in _The Madras House_; but his third act is positively less poignant than a reality like that.

Yet this is not the worst. Even if we said to ourselves, “Let us be always--but varyingly--ugly,” we should not have phrased our greatest danger. Our greatest danger is simply the loss of all standards of beauty in dress. “Why do all the women walk like ducks this year?” was the question put to a friend of mine, years since, by a younger brother. He did not know that a quite new kind of corset had suddenly, during the summer months, “come in.” To wear it meant change of gait and posture, eventually actual change of shape. Yet we all wore it--and doubtless went on praising the Venus of Melos as we did so. The notion that, after we have learned from the scientists to deal in evolutionary periods of millions of years, we ought not naïvely to expect to alter the human form in a season or two, never occurred, I fancy, to any of us. “Business is business,” men are credited with saying, when invited to apply abstract laws of honor. “Fashion is fashion,” women would surely say if invited to apply abstract laws of beauty.

The worst thing is that the drapery or the trimming that is lovely and desirable in our eyes one year, is unspeakably offensive to our gaze the next. (Consider, for example, the chequered history of fringe!--its career like that of a French Pretender.) Fashion has vitiated our taste to that point. Our welcoming raptures are as sincere as our shuddering rejections. There was a time when sleeves could not--I say it advisedly--be too large. I remember seeing a girl turn to edge sideways through a large door, for fear of crushing the sleeves of a new bodice. Her brothers laughed; but I--I was very young--felt a pang of clear, unmitigated envy. I remember at that time prophecies that tight sleeves would never come in again--they were so ugly. Yet how many times, since then, have tight sleeves come in--and gone out? While, if one dared to make any prophecy about the clothes of the future, it would be that those _very_ large sleeves would never again be worn: they are so hideous.

There is no point in pretending that one is superior to this fluctuating standard. One is not. Ideally speaking, every woman should keep the language of fashion and the language of taste rigidly apart. “Fashionable” and “beautiful” should not be used interchangeably. Theoretically, we all acknowledge the difference; but it is another matter when we are faced by the actual product. There may be, here and there, a woman who can say with sincerity, “She wore a hideous thing she has just got from Worth”; but where is the woman who could ingenuously report: “She had on a lovely frock made in the style of year before last”? I could not do it myself; nor, I fancy, could you. We may not like the new mode the very first time that we see it; we may pity before we endure; but we end by embracing. The bravest of us can do no more than criticize for its ugliness something fashionable. When it comes to praising for its beauty something unfashionable, the words stick in our throats. Clothes that are unfashionable simply do not look beautiful to us. Presently they may, when the kaleidoscope has been turned again; but not now. And that means that we have given up a good deal of intellectual freedom.

I have called the loss of æsthetic standards our greatest danger. One would prefer to think that it is. One likes to believe that the “prestige value” of the current mode is due to an honest if mistaken conviction of its beauty, not to the implications of income that both fashionable and unfashionable clothes make so definitely. It is pleasanter to say to one’s self that the woman who refuses an invitation to dinner because her best frock is two years old fears criticism of her taste, than that she fears an estimate of her dressmaker’s bill. The code is more alluring. But even assuming this to be the cause, the result is no less unfortunate: namely, an almost universal social timidity on the part of unfashionably dressed women--by which I mean, for the moment, nothing worse than women in frocks that were fashionable a season since. And that is a pity.

One does not, on the whole, regret history; and our institutions are by this time historic. I offer the suggestion as one who is glad, rather than sorry, that John Adams was not (according to his reputed desire) created Duke of Braintree. But an hereditary aristocracy serves some charming minor purposes, one of them being, perhaps, the social countenancing of dowdiness. A duchess may be as dowdy as she likes; and other women may with impunity be the less smart in a land where there are always duchesses being dowdy. I am sufficiently American, myself, not really to admire the typical Englishwoman’s clothes. Half a dozen queer necklaces and a perfectly irrelevant bit of lace pinned on somewhere, do not atone to me for a faded straw hat at Christmas and a skirt that is six inches shorter in front than in back. Not many years ago, I went, with the briefest possible interval, from a British suffrage meeting to a dress-rehearsal at the Comédie Française. The resulting sensation amounted to a shock. “Frenchwomen could not dress like Englishwomen without conviction of sin,” I said to my companion. “And ought not to,” was his firm rejoinder. At the moment, I agreed with him. But there is something fine, after all, in the attitude of the woman who, having occasion to go to some “function” of a kind that she usually avoided, brought out a frock from her ten-year-old trousseau, and had it furbished up by a sempstress. The frock, I should say, had passed from her mother’s trousseau into her own, having served for the former’s presentation at court on the occasion of her marriage. It may be that an untitled woman could not have done it so debonairly. It would certainly be hard for a good American to follow her example. But the very idea brings one such a hint of freedom as it takes--they say--a limited monarchy to give.

Sensible people realize that children should not be overdressed, and a few schools in this country have adopted the conventual method of putting their pupils into uniforms. But the uniforms are, I fear, only another turn of the kaleidoscope. I know that in one such school, at least, the girls wear the school costume all day, but dress in the evening as variously and as elaborately as they choose. A rule like that is _magnifique et pas cher_. For grown-ups, there is no uniform at all. The fact is that we are uncomfortable if we are not fashionably dressed. No man understands the subtle and complex significance of the phrase “nothing to wear”--witness the distressed but utterly puzzled expression that overspreads a man’s face at the words. He knows that his wife or his sister looks charming in “the blue one,” or “the lace one,” or “the one with the jet.” She has looked charming in it often enough for him at last to identify it--and that, unless he is an exception to his sex, is very often. He is cheerfully getting into his evening coat for the fiftieth time. No wonder he does not realize that some frock which, the first time it was worn, made for triumph, should, the tenth time, make for humiliation. But the most strong-minded woman--the woman who will, if necessary, go to the opera on a gala night in a coat and skirt--at heart exonerates the woman who so foolishly, for the reason mentioned, stops at home.

There is much to be said, whether in the fifteenth century or the twentieth, for the aristocracy of wealth and all that it can do for the community in which it prevails. Neither Florence nor New York, probably, if consulted, would wish, or would have wished, to give up its Magnificent. But there are minor ways in which an aristocracy of wealth makes us all more sordid. Obviously, in these conditions, one’s income must constitute one’s claim to distinction, and, obviously, one can give mannerly evidence of one’s income only by the amount visibly, not audibly, spent. How more silently and more visibly than by personal adornment? Is all this too trite to say? It behooves the man, for many reasons, not to adorn himself--perhaps, even, not in any merely personal way to outshine other men--while his wife may not only please herself but render his reputation a positive service by out-shining other women. She makes no indiscreet disclosures of fact, but she rustles with pecuniary implications. In an aristocracy of wealth, Paris may go far to make a peeress of her.

I do not wish to imply that this is the sole American standard: there are communities in which “family” counts; and there are the academic backwaters where strange-scaled fish constitute among themselves aristocracies of intellect. It need hardly be said that in the latter places dress counts least of all. One may go to hear even the most distinguished lecturer in any rag one has; and we are judged rather by the obvious intention of a frock than by its actual achievement. There is so much of Oxford in any of our college towns. But no one can deny that the aristocracy most widely developed in America is that of wealth. It is developed in places that are really too small to afford an aristocracy at all. I myself have known women whose fathers carried dinner-pails and whose husbands have never even stopped to regret that their own education ended with the grammar-school course, who simply did not feel that the shabbily or simply dressed woman could be in their class. She may be descended from a half a dozen Signers, and be at home in every picture-gallery in Europe, but she is some one to whom, socially, they cannot but condescend.

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

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

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

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

CAVIARE ON PRINCIPLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE EXTIRPATION OF CULTURE

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

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

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

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

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

3. Materialism in all classes.

4. The idolatry of science.

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

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

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

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

Now there is this about a pragmatic truth: like any other invention of the devil, it smooths the road for the lazy. If it did not smooth the road, it would not be, by pragmatic definition, truth. And the great bulk of us have found the “free and equal” statement such a help that, though we cannot pretend for a moment that it is true, we stick to it. The schoolboy sticks to it because it greases his oratory; the politician sticks to it because his constituents like the sound of it; the detrimental sticks to it because it is his only apology. And, just as you cannot suppress a word without eventually suppressing the thing it stands for, so you cannot utter a statement forever without imbibing some of its poison. Even as our reasonable national pride turned into the spread-eagleism that Dickens and Mrs. Trollope caricatured, so the “free and equal” shibboleth turned into the “I am as good as you are” formula. Why trouble about anything, if you were already lord of the world? At first, it was Europe we defied. What were the ancient oligarchies, to impose on us their standards, intellectual, social, or moral? We set up our own standards, because we were as good as any one else--and also because it was a little easier.

Let me say before going further, that I am not blaming the lower classes alone for the extirpation of culture among us. The upper classes are equally responsible--if, indeed, not even more to blame. We have become materialistic: our very virtues are more materialistic than they were. It is forgivable in the poor man to be materialistic; for unless he has bread to keep his body alive, he will presently have no soul to cherish. Materialism is less pardonable in the man who always knows where his next meal is coming from. He, if you like, does have time to worry about his soul. None the less, he worries about it very little. There used to be a good deal of fun poked at settlement-workers who tried to read Dante and Shakespeare to slum-dwellers. I am not sure that those misguided youths and maidens who first carried Dante and Shakespeare into the slums were not right as to substance, however wrong they were as to sequence. The only morally decent excuse for wanting to have a little more money than you actually need to feed and clothe your family, is your ambition to have a little mental energy to spend on things not of the body. The ultimate tragedy of the slums is that, in slum conditions, one can scarcely think, from birth to death, of anything but the body. The upper-class people who think of pleasing their palates instead of relieving hunger, of being in the fashion instead of covering their nakedness, are no more civilized than the slum-dwellers. They are apt, it is true, to become more so; for it is a strange fact that a family can seldom be rich through several generations without discovering some æsthetic truths. And æsthetic truths lead to moral perceptions. You cannot with impunity fill your ears with good music, your eyes with good painting and sculpture and architecture. Something happens to you, after a time, no matter how vulgar you may be. But wealth is very fluctuating in our country; and several generations of it are not often seen. The people who are now rich are generally people whose grandfathers and great-grandfathers were fighting for sheer existence. So we have the spectacle of the dominant plutocrats (no one will deny that plutocracy is the order of the day, both here and in Europe) either mindful themselves of the struggle for existence, or in a state of having only just forgotten it. They are not going to push their children into a race for intangible goods. And the more we recruit from immigrants who bring no personal traditions with them, the more America is going to ignore the things of the spirit. No one whose consuming desire is either for food or for motor-cars is going to care about culture, or even know what it is. And it is another misfortune of our over-quickened social evolution that the middle classes do not stay middle class. They climb to wealth, or sink to indigence. Neither that quick rise nor that quick fall is a period in which to cherish their own or their children’s intellects.

Both from above and below, then, our colleges and schools have felt the hostile pressure. Colleges are, on the one hand, jeered at for doing their business badly, and, on the other, accused of being too difficult. We are always hearing that college is of no earthly use to a man except as he learns there to rub up against other men. We are always hearing, also, that the college curriculum is a cruel strain on the average boy or girl. On one score or another, the colleges are always being attacked; and the attack usually includes the hint that the real test of a “college education” is not the intrinsic value, but its success or failure in preparing the youth for something that has nothing to do with learning. Will it be of social or financial use to him? If not, why make sacrifices to get it? Far be it from me to assert that the intellectual flame never burns in the breast of collegiate youth! But I do believe it provable that there is far less tendency to regard learning as a good in itself, and far more tendency to cheat scholarship, if possible, in the interest of some other thing held good, than there was two generations ago. Ignorance of what real learning is, and a consequent suspicion of it; materialism, and a consequent intellectual laxity--both of these have done destructive work in the colleges.

The education of younger children is in like case. We put them into kindergartens where their reasoning powers are ruined; or, if we can afford it, we buy Montessori outfits that were invented for semi-imbeciles in Italian slums; or we send them to outdoor schools and give them prizes for sleeping. Every one knows what a fight the old universities have had to put up to keep their entrance standards at all. With the great new army of state universities admitting students from the public schools without examination, because they themselves are part of the big public-school system, how can it be otherwise?

Now the patriotic American may see--and rightly enough--in the public-school system which includes a college training, a relic of the desperate desire of our forefathers that education, as a major good, should be within the reach of all and sundry. But even the patriotic American must see another impulse at work: the impulse to put the college intellectually, as well as financially, within the reach of all. The Colleges must not set up standards for themselves that the average boy or girl, from the ordinary school, cannot reach without difficulty, because that is undemocratic.

Now I know as well as other people that it is positively harder to get into our old universities to-day than it was in our fathers’ day. But granted the enormously increased facilities for preparation all over the land, it is not relatively anything like so hard. Certainly, once in, it is possible to get through the college course with less work than ever before. In the first place, there is a much wider choice of subjects on which a boy can get his degree: his tastes are consulted as they never used to be. If he does not want to endure the discipline of Greek, he can get an A.B. at every college in the country--except Princeton--without knowing a word of Greek. Even at Princeton, he can take a Litt.B. and let Greek forever alone.[A] He can study sociology, or Spanish, or physical culture, or nearly anything he likes. I have even heard that in one of our state universities there is a department of hat-trimming, which contributes its quota to the courses for a (presumably feminine) academic degree.