Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

V

It will, I think, be conceded that the special distinction of the American woman does not lie in her intellect or her learning. Brilliant gifts and attainments, to a certain point, may indeed be exceptionally frequent; but they have often been equaled, if not exceeded, in the past. It lies, rather, in her facility for utilizing knowledge and adapting it to visible ends. To a combination of many talents has been added one to make them all available. It is essentially a talent for “arriving,” in other words, a talent for success, either with or without intellectual ability of a high order, and consists largely in a keen insight as to serviceable values, with a marked aptness for catching salient points and using them to the best advantage. It is a variation of the same talent that has made our country the wonder of the century. In men we call it business sagacity, but it may find an outlet in many other channels besides the amassing of fortunes. In women we call it cleverness, and its shades are endless. It makes the success of the philanthropist, the leader, and the administrator of the household, as well as the fortune of the social aspirant, and sometimes of the charlatan. In itself it has no ethical quality. It is simply an instrument, and its value depends upon the end for which it is used. But the result of it is that no women in the world have so much versatility, or make a little knowledge go so far.

On the social side this talent is invaluable, and it is one of the most piquant charms of the American woman, when the sharp corners of provincialism are rubbed off. On the intellectual side, however, though it gives an adaptable quality to genuine scholarship, it drifts easily into superficiality and affectation. I do not mean to say that the club is responsible for the fact that a hundred charlatans follow in the wake of every real talent, as a hundred Tartufes in the wake of every saint—when saints are in fashion; but it is responsible when it takes a bit of colored glass for a gem. It is sure, also, to suffer from the pretension of those who illy represent it. The salon, which made things of the intellect a fashion, received its worst blow in the house of its friends. Madelon, in “Les Précieuses Ridicules,” looked upon life as a failure if she chanced to miss the last romance, or portrait, or madrigal, or sonnet; and Cathos declared that she should die of shame if any one asked her about something new which she had not seen. The pen of Molière sketched the crude copy of a fine thing in colors too vivid to be mistaken, and henceforth the copy stood for the thing. The world had its undiscriminating laugh at the salons; good taste blushed at the company in which it found itself; and the interests of intelligent women were put back for a generation. It was not the first time that a good cause has suffered from its too zealous followers, nor is it likely to be the last. The world moves in circles, even if there be a spiral tendency upward, as the optimists amiably assure us.

Doubtless we fancy ourselves much wiser than those seventeenth-century précieuses whose imitators did them so much harm. Certainly we put more seriousness into our pretensions. But we have our own little faults and affectations, though they are not precisely the same. We do not devote ourselves to portraits, or sonnets, or madrigals. We do not moralize in maxims, good or bad, nor do we pretend to be sentimental; indeed, we pretend not to be, if we are. Sentiment is out of fashion. The modern Philaminte may look with chilling pity upon her belated sister who has the courage to like Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, when she ought to prefer Ibsen and the symbolists; but she is not likely to faint at a common word, or dismiss her cook for a solecism. Our foibles are of quite another sort. Instead of painting little pictures on a small canvas, we take a very large canvas and pad our pictures to fit it. We do not map out the passions on a carte du tendre, or give our valuable time to the discussion of a high-flown Platonism which cradles a woman in rose-leaves, while her lover waits for her a dozen years or so because it is vulgar to marry; but we map out the fields of the intellect, extending from protoplasm to the fixed stars, and undertake to traverse the whole as confidently as we start for a morning walk. If we cannot get over the ground fast enough, we can take an electric train and catch flying glimpses sufficient to give us a pleasant consciousness of being intelligent and quite modern.

Such vast aims are, no doubt, praiseworthy, and reflect great credit on the clubs which have demonstrated so clearly the expansive quality of the feminine mind; but they are also fatiguing, and suggest the possibility that these same clubs are pushing us a little too fast and too far. One is often forced to the conclusion that we should do more if we did not try to do quite so much. It is very well to follow Emerson’s advice to “hitch your wagon to a star”; but he never proposed hitching it to all the constellations at once. When I hear the Greek poets, the Italian painters, the English novelists, and the German masters disposed of at a symposium in a single afternoon, as I did not long ago, I wonder if the rare quality of mental distinction which made the glory of the Immortals will exist at all in the future; whether we shall not build tents for our thoughts instead of temples; whether, indeed, the finest flavor of thought will not be as hopelessly lost as the perfume of the flowers that are scattered in indiscriminate heaps along the highways to show their quantity.

Nor is there less danger in attempting too large things than too many things. It is certainly courageous for a woman who knows little of history, less of philosophy, and nothing at all about the art of writing, to undertake the Herculean task of preparing a paper on “The Pagan Philosophers and their Schools.” With the best efforts, she will have only a few outlines of facts and second-hand opinions, which might have a certain value if either she or her audience proposed to fill them out. But this is precisely what the modern woman who wishes to know a little of everything has no time to do, even if she have the inclination. There is to be a similar outline of Greek literature the next week, one of the middle ages the week after, and so on to the end of the season, when she has a fine collection of skeletons, with no flesh and blood on any of them, if, indeed, the skeletons themselves have not vanished into thin air. The Forty Immortals would shrink with dismay from the magnitude of such a scheme. The worst of it is that one comes to have a false sense of perspective, and to judge works of the intellect by their size instead of their quality—like the pretentious but ignorant woman who gravely remarked, after hearing a brilliant talk from a brilliant man on Irish wit, that she “did not find it very improving.” There is, too, the natural result of calling things by the wrong names, and mistaking the thinnest of veneering for culture.

It is by no means necessary, or even desirable, that every woman belonging to a club should be a savante; indeed, considering the number of the clubs, I am not sure that this would not bring about a more deplorable state of affairs than if there were none at all. It may even be better for the average woman to know a little about many things than all about one thing, if she has a certain discrimination as to values, and the fine sense of proportion which is the result of more or less mental training. But it is desirable that each one should have at least a little knowledge of what she undertakes to write or talk about. Why a woman who might have something to say concerning certain phases of our colonial life should be asked to write a paper on Greek art, of which she has not even read, much less thought, or one who is more or less familiar with various pleasant corners of English literature should be called upon to entertain her hearers on the Italian Renaissance, of which she knows nothing whatever, is one of the mysteries of the new era. “I am so glad to see you,” said one woman to a friend whom she met on the street. “I have a paper to write on the symbolists. You know all about such things. What are the symbolists, anyway?” We are told that when the blind lead the blind, both are likely to come to grief. It is needless to say that these faults are not universal, as there is a great deal of careful study and fine thought in the clubs, but they are sufficiently common to be noted among things to be avoided.

A still more serious danger lies in the endless multiplication of clubs, which offers an irresistible temptation to those who like to cull a little here, and a little there, without too exacting effort in any direction. They may all be valuable in themselves, but because it is good to belong to one or two active clubs of different aims, it does not follow that it is good to belong to a dozen; and I know of a woman who claims with pride that she belongs to twenty-two! “Moderation is the charm of life,” said Jean Paul, and one sees with regret how little of that sort of charm there is left; indeed, I am not sure that it has not ceased to be considered a charm. We may find a note of warning in the later days of the great salons. The social life of the eighteenth century reads like a page of our own, with its whirl of conversazioni, its talks on science, its experiments in chemistry, physiology, psychology, its mania for discussing literature, art, and philosophy. The literary salons had blossomed into great centers of intellectual brilliancy, of which all this life was the natural pendant. It was the fashion then, as now, for women to concern themselves with affairs of state; to talk of the rights of man, though they had less to say than we have about the rights of woman; to dream of a social millennium, which they were doomed to wade through rivers of blood without reaching. They too invaded the secrets of the laboratory, and even the surgeon’s domain. We hear of a young countess who carried a skeleton in her trunk when she went on a journey, “as one might carry a book to read,” in order to study anatomy. These women, like ourselves, aimed to know a little of everything. They too were fired with the passion for intelligence and the passion for multitudes. With the craving for novelties came the ever-growing need of a stronger spice to make them palatable. In this carnival of the mind they lost their faith and simplicity, loved with their brains instead of their hearts, forgot their natural duties, and found natural ties irksome. Longing for rest without the power to rest, they suffered from maladies of the nerves, and were devoured with the ennui of exhaustion. Life lost its equilibrium, and the result was inevitable. The reaction from the restlessness of an intellect that is not fed from inner sources, but finds its stimulus and theater alike in the world, was toward an exaggeration of the sensibilities. “If I could become calm, I should believe myself on a wheel,” said one whose brilliancy had dazzled a generation. This fatal “too much” was not the least of the causes that lost to women the empire they had won. All movements are measured, in the end, by a standard of common sense, and reactions are in proportion to the deviation from a just mean. The revolution which brought liberty to men, or at least shifted the burdens to some one else, deprived women of what they had. They were forbidden to organize, and sent back to the fireside and cradles. The republic swept away from them the last vestige of political power, and gave them nothing in the place of their lost social kingdom. They were forced to speak with hushed voices in hidden coteries. Of these there were always a few, but their prestige was gone. “There is one thing which is not French,” said Napoleon; “it is that a woman can do as she pleases.” And he proceeded straightway to give point to his theory by exiling the ablest woman in France and silencing all the rest.

We are apt to take high moral ground on the frivolity of these women, and to pride ourselves on our superiority because we have such a serious way of amusing ourselves—so serious, indeed, that we forget there can be anything so questionable as frivolity about it. To be sure, the clubs are free from many of the faults of the salons. They do not put social conventions in the place of principles, nor substitute an esthetic conscience for an ethical one; nor do they drift at all in the direction of moral laxity. A movement of the intellect, too, which has its roots in the character is more likely to last than one that hangs on the suffrage of those it was meant to please and glorify. But we have the same mental unrest, the same thirst for excitement, the same feverish activity, the same indisposition to stay at home with our thoughts. A fever of the intellect may be preferable to a fever of the senses, and less harmful as an epidemic, but it tends equally toward exhaustion and disintegration. It is not so much a question of morals as a question of balance. The modern fashion, however, of doing everything, even to thinking, in masses, is not altogether due to a fever of the intellect, any more than it was a hundred years ago. Much of it is doubtless due to a genuine love of knowledge, much of it to a haunting desire to be doing something in the outside world, though the thing done be possibly not at all worth the doing; but a great deal of it is due to a sort of hyperæsthesia of the social sentiment, or the mental restlessness that betrays a lack of poise and depth in the character. We call it the spirit of the age—the innocent phantom which has to bear the burden of most of our sins, and is gathering so resistless a force that the strongest and wisest are swept along, despite themselves, in its accelerating course. But the spirit of the age is only the sum of individual forces. It needs only a sufficient number of wise counter-forces to temper and modify it.