Alexander Black

“ Society is built upon individual sacrifice. Friendship lives by concession, and the intimacy of marriage carries to the extreme point the idea of inter-personal compromise, the recognition of the personality of another. To expect two people to lose, without effort, by the mere fact of marriage, the individuality which they had before the compact, is as absurd as it would be to take two clocks and tie them together with a piece of pink string and expect them instantly to begin keeping absolutely the same time. ”

“ However, our national past and our national present are so full of superficial and even of fundamental contrasts, that if ever a merciful sentence is to be passed upon one who, peering through the “turbid media” of sociological analysis, mistakes the Zeitgeist for a new woman, it is in our own longitudes. Like a child growing up under the eye of an arrogant and pompous parent, we have, nationally, been made to feel from the beginning that we are new, even tentative, that we are unclassified, all but vagrant in the ethnological sense. ”

“ I feel it in my bones that in spite of a gleam of intelligent interrogation as to the wisdom of pampering the American girl, I am going to keep right on—”
“You mean, if you will be honest,” blurted the Professor, “that you will keep on letting her alone as you do the boy child. That is all. Own up. The most that you have done is cease the special repression of the girl. For better or for worse the American has done simply that: forget sex in rearing his young.”
“Ah, Professor! when we forget sex are we not in danger of a costly transgression? Are we not combating nature?” ”

“ We can understand that there is a merely relative difference of attitude between the savage lover who woos his lady with a club, and the modern suitor who swears to give up all of his clubs for her sake. What perplexes us is our anxiety to explain our modern instinct, and (what is more perplexing) our anxiety to explain her; to ascertain and even to catalogue her essential traits—to discover, if not why we prefer the American girl, at least what manner of girl it is that we thus are instinctively preferring. ”

“ This independence has not merely accentuated the elusiveness which belongs to her as a woman. The quality of being hard to get is not new in woman, or in any degree original in any race. Ranging from the conditions in which barbaric woman is knocked down by the strongest bidder, to those in which she is knocked down to the highest, there is a uniform, because instinctive, outward habit of indifference or aloofness in the sex. But Miss America’s independence affects the whole question of her choice and the method of her choice. ”

“ Who can tell what passes in the heart of a woman? Who can read her as she reads her letters over there in the corner of the summer hotel verandah? Who can say what she is thinking there in the shadow of the birch-tree picking off the petals? “He loves me—he loves me not”—no, surely something more modern. What could be more piquing than that partnership—nature and a woman? If she chooses to take another member into the firm, that is her affair. ”

“ Does any one deny that climate and history have made the Kentucky girl a being apart—that the Kentucky horses which she has ridden with so much spirit have had their effect in her whole style and personality? Could we fail to look for a distinctive flowering in the verdant slopes beyond the Sierras or amid that intensely American human environment on the plains of Texas? ”

“ She is as willing as ever to follow a leader. She only asks that she may elect her leader, not with a ballot, but with the benediction of her love. She knows, with her truest insight, that there is no device of science, nor ideal of sentiment that ever has been or ever can be a substitute in this world for the love of one man for one woman and of that one woman for that man. ”

“ It is hard to live down a tradition. Take the tradition about the college girl, for example, the tradition that she is a sombre person, strenuous, unlovely, dominated by an ambition to subdue man and emancipate her sex by sheer force of learning. You can call up a picture of her at work, her brain throbbing with great thoughts, her face seared by study, greeting you with a smileless challenge to talk to the point, mostly in Latin, and with a decent frequency in quotations from Plato and Epictetus. ”

“ This may be an odd contention from me, but to me one of the most distinctive traits of the American girl is her gift for being unserious. It is not always a sense of humor, either; if it is, it is a sense entirely her own, for it [81] certainly is not associated with traits which we ascribe to a sense of humor in men. In any case it is a saving sense, a sense that keeps her from taking things so tragically as the unknowing or unsympathetic spectator might expect. The American has a genius for radicalism, a creative defiance of logic and tradition. ”

“ The American does not repress his daughter. You admit that you like the result. Why wrinkle your brow in contemplation of the future? Why not believe that what seems to be true is true, that the American girl flourishes agreeably in her freedom? ”

“ The suggestion that woman can get along without man is an impeachment of his charm and of her wisdom. One thing is always to be remembered: a man cannot reasonably expect to conquer a woman by not marrying her. If the girl bachelor does not know what is good for her, if her position is untenable, if she is losing precious time, a cynical attitude in the man bachelor does not seem at all likely to help the matter. The presumption that the American girl knows what she is about may be erroneous, but ill temper in the opposition will simply fortify her. ”

“ By a faculty and privilege of making things seem reasonable that are not at all reasonable, by a witchcraft, a sophistry of fashion, a trick of illusion, in the presence of which we forget every rule of art, every principle of proportion, every prejudice of habit, she can utterly bewilder us in a master stroke of invincible instinct. ”

“ If the progress of education has menaced sentiment, who shall say that the greatest of sentiments may not be the first to suffer? Nothing is truer than that all women are not equally capable of sentiment. Some women seem to like the symbol of an emotion quite as well as if it were the genuine article. To them the innocuous make-believe of love is quite as satisfactory as the real thing. They play with a great sentiment as they used to play with their dolls, which gave much less trouble than real children and furnished just as much sentimental excitement as if they actually had been alive. ”

“ I said to the Professor, “you will remember the things science once undertook to tell us about the great dualities. ‘Witness,’ said science, with not a glimmer of insincerity, ‘the beautiful interdependence of the two lobes of the cerebrum! How marvellous is their union! Each individual in form and function, yet working in an eternal harmony. One cannot get along without the other. Let one side of the brain be hurt and the other droops in sympathetic inactivity.’ This was lovely. It fortified every advocate of the fitness of marriage. ”

“ The world has seen marriage by capture, by service, by purchase, by social convenience, by free and natural choice. The experiment of marriage by free choice has received in our own country its fullest trial. Marriage by social convenience and by purchase still survive, even with us, and there are many among us who think that marriage for love may not be final as a national trait, and that we will discover that the compact of marriage, being in the interest of society and actually under the government of society should be made directly in conformity with the convenience of society. ”

“ The American seems to me to be guiding his children as he guides his civic affairs, not by brute force but by giving and taking. If his child is born with the right to the pursuit of happiness, he believes in starting the pursuit early. I suppose that children in the United States have greater liberty than children in any other country. The conferring of liberty has its dangers, and those who confer it cannot expect to escape the obligations that go with the gift. It has cost the American some annoyance to confer liberty and privileges on grown-up folks from various quarters. ”

“ Every age has blamed its beaux for wanting the true gallantry of beaux in the past. We all have heard Miss America say, rather petulantly, that the days of chivalry are gone. Perhaps they are; perhaps our men give too little attention to the graces of life. But let us hope that the modern man is not always as satire paints him, that for the little shams of chivalry he has substituted some real essence of an even deeper homage. ”

“ It begins to look as if it was at college that the American girl learned that it is not good for woman to be alone—even with her family. At any rate, that independence which is so characteristic of the American girl, which is, as I have been informed and believe, somewhat disconcerting to men, is, undoubtedly, largely the result of the American girl’s improved relations with her sister women. When she is as successfully gregarious with regard to women as men are with regard to men, her sex maturity will be complete. ”

“ If the privileges of a host’s roof are liberally construed by the English girl, the American girl takes a candid and undaunted view of a hotel and a public ballroom; and under conditions which in any manner detach her from the immediate presence of formality, she falls back upon her individual preferences, her personally developed methods of meeting situations, with a readiness and sureness that carry their own vindication. Because she can have a developed individuality yet be no rebel, the American girl can grasp and enjoy liberty without despising authority. ”

“ Prattle about a woman’s instinct is a man’s way of dodging admission of woman’s subtler sense. If I actually had the time I should like to impress upon you the fact that dress is a department of the fine arts; that it has a logic and a language, principles, rules, functions, and a future. But that is another matter. Man is hampered by absurd prejudices as to clothes, especially as to the clothes of women. Our Concord philosopher remarked that the consciousness of being well dressed imparts a peace and confidence which even religion scarcely can bestow. ”

“ In the same way, there is no form of hat yet devised by human ingenuity that will not tempt forgiveness when it is on the right woman.
And woman herself quite clearly perceives the force of association, the importance, if the significance of the hat is to be preserved and understood, of keeping it on her head. If this were not so why should we be confronted with the monumental paradox that our womankind are keeping their hats on in church and taking them off in places of amusement? At the theatre woman consents to be separated from her hat, and to have her hat separated from her. ”

“ Meanwhile it is pleasantly easy to detect many interesting changes in the situation of the American girl within the span of the century. Whether she merely illustrates the social and political changes which have taken place, or, as we so often have been urged to believe, actually indicates why they have taken place, she presents a spectacle of peculiar interest, a spectacle which has so successfully piqued the analytical spirit of the period that it would be expounding the commonplace to do more than quickly sketch a few of the outlines. ”

“ Above all, it is an art in which woman chooses to express herself in a language free from the inhibitions placed upon other arts, in which, ignoring when she chooses, the primary excuses and incentives, she takes an art-for-art’s-sake justification for showing us the separate and independent fascination, in themselves, of sublimated clothes. No one who cannot perceive the inherent interest, if not the inherent justification, of clothes as clothes, ever can see deeply into the philosophy of dress, or ever can see deeply into the philosophy of women. ”

“ The old maid of tradition has become a fantastic figure, as fantastic as if she had no actual successor—which possibly is the real fact, for old-maidism is not strictly a social condition but a state of mind. Nothing could better demonstrate this than the prominence and multiplicity of married old maids. It is a mere truism to say that old-maidism is not even restricted by gender. Who does not know the masculine old maid! He is an altogether different creature from the normal bachelor. Indeed, he sometimes is married. In this instance contemporary satire is entirely within facts ”

“ Clothes, then, are not merely to warm or to conceal, but also to decorate. Wherein they warm or conceal, they are a science. Wherein they decorate, they are an art. The science is exact; the art is rich in variety and change, making every other art its handmaiden, every season its holiday, every [124] sentiment its theme. It is an art redolent of the years, tingling with the daring of youth. ”

“ The traveller in a scurrying railroad train becomes familiar with few more thought-suggesting sights than the farm woman in the cottage door. She comes forward with her hands in her apron, if not with a baby on her arm. Sometimes she waves her hand to the unanswering train. Sometimes she leans against the door-post and looks, one might fancy wistfully, at the clattering cars, at the people who are going somewhere. ”

“ I myself have seen American women who, to a merely masculine prejudice, seem to be wearing too many rings. But we must make reasonable allowance for the natural accumulations of time. It has occurred to me that I might do as we may with a tree,—tell a woman’s age by her rings.
So that in looking about and finding the whole of human society “hooked, and buttoned up and held together by clothes,” we cannot hope in any successful way to investigate the matter, if we forget for a moment that the dress of women is to be looked at as a subjective element. ”

“ Who, without an obstinately anthropological mind, shall regret [8] that the beginnings of our national life are veiled in the Ante-Photographic era—that we may invest them with qualities we wish they might have had, as well as with those qualities of which we think we know? Who shall say that humanity, A. P., dwelling in a softening haze beyond the harshly illuminated era of Realism, is worse off than humanity thereafter? ”

“ The gesture of the fingers with which a woman readjusts a hairpin, or, perhaps, simply ascertains that it is doing its duty, is wonderfully similar among all women. Yet the gesture may to a singular degree be a reflection of her personal style, and in that latitude for purely personal grace you sometimes are brought to the compensatory fact that in sitting behind the hat you also are sitting behind the hairpins. ”

“ Miss America is no illusion, if some spectators have doubted their senses.
By the grace of nature she is that she is. If the American man continues to pay her the supreme compliment of not understanding her, that is his [21] affair. It always is easier to perceive the other’s folly than our own—especially when the exciting cause is a woman. We know better than the spectator why we permit certain seeming tyrannies! We analyze the American girl in a purely Pickwickian [22] spirit, not because we expect actually to discover facts, but for the immediate pleasure of the speculation. ”

“ What was not unbecoming of a child would be disgraceful of a youth.’ We certainly have outgrown that view of things, and the American youngster comes nearer being without hypocrisy than any product of civilization that I ever have studied. But what have we in place of the piety and affectation? What is the working result of so much independence? Are not the American girl children, as well as the boys, a trifle irreverent? ”

“ The American girl is so definitely a social creature, and her social attributes are so personal, that she never appears to be dependent upon social machinery. She brings into society the invaluable force of her individual availability. That our social groups seem to cohere proves that she must possess in some degree that deference to form which begins in the acceptance of terms. Humanity can never pair well until it has grouped well. Grouping is the beginning of that compromise which reaches its crisis in pairing. ”