“Did it ever occur to you,” demanded the Professor, “how few people actually do fashionable things?—that we probably are just as hyperbolical in assuming that young women once amused themselves with embroidery as that they now amuse themselves with golf?”
“Stitches and links,” I pondered, knowing that the Professor did not expect an answer.
“What proportion of folks should you say actually do concentrate their functions in the ‘barbaric swat’?”
I lifted my head; and she went on:
“Yes, I know that there always must be a fashionable, a dominating pastime, and I have no disparagement of golf as golf. It is a good enough game in its way. I am bound to admit this after having made a very good score myself. Moreover, it is Scottish, which is a guarantee of a latent profundity. It is a large game, and, as Sir Walter said of eating tarts, is ‘no inelegant pleasure.’ I have been told by those who have had an opportunity to know, that it calls out a great variety of qualities. That may be said of many other things; but no matter. My suggestion is that the assumption of prevalence in a so-called fashionable thing leaves something unexplained, something that may be very important, a philosophical hiatus—”
“Professor,” I said, “have you never stopped to think that fashionable fads and fads that are not fashionable are potent in two ways, that is to say, first and primarily, in participation, and second, in contemplation? There is less golf than talk about golf. One game of golf may be repeated any day, for example, one hundred million times in print. As the newspapers play golf with type, so the physically present spectators on the links are repeated many-fold in those who not less are participants and spectators, who wear ostentatious golf stockings without ever having seen a teeing ground. This secondary participation and appreciation is the breath of life to social fads. Probably this may be said of all not absolutely primary pleasures. And so society says, ‘We are all playing golf,’ which is not true at all, but which instantly produces a situation that amounts to the same thing. We shall say that one woman in ten thousand who may be in a situation, so far as opportunity is concerned, to play anything, is playing golf, but this shall not make it possible for the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine who are not playing golf, to play anything else and make it fashionable at the same time. This could not be, any more than that we could have more than one Napoleon, more than one most-talked-of book, more than one absorbing scandal, at a time. All epidemics present this feature of concentration. Napoleon was just as much an epidemic as crinoline or ‘Robert Elsmere.’ The hypnotists have a word for this which has escaped me at the moment—”
“Multo-suggestion,” contributed the Professor, patiently.
“Something to that effect, in which we have a scientific explanation of the exclusiveness of fashion, an explanation of fashion itself. And the thing could not be different. That susceptibility to the contagion of enthusiasm which inspires the American with so passionate an interest in all of his hobbies, is a susceptibility which explains his keener interest in life, his democracy of sentiment, his ardent yet generally cautious and sane pursuit of entertainment.”