In the old romances the dead leaves crackled, and the cavalier of her dreams whispered the soft right word in her ear, and she murmured “Yes!” spelling it with two letters and a capital N as in the present hour. Would the gallant of the past be to her liking to-day? Would she receive him civilly, or would she tease and taunt him in her provoking modern way, abusing the qualities she liked in him, sending him away because she didn’t want him to go, telling him that he should never win her because she had begun to fear that he would?
Neither the brusqueness nor the diffidence of the Puritan lover would be likely to please her. The Puritan lover would lack a great many of the qualities she now admires in men, chief among these, mayhap, the quality of not being too solemn. She is far from Puritan severity herself, and she would, I fear, see him go with a sigh of relief. In the quality of not being too solemn, she might find the beau of Louis XVI.’s time more to her liking, though his eagerness to draw his sword for her would certainly make her laugh. She never would appreciate the romance of his dainty duels.
His pretty speeches would amuse her for a little while, but the man who flatters her nowadays must be a more expert artist to escape the mortal wound of her ridicule. In a later day compliment undoubtedly became more of an art, and the dude of the Directoire, whom you might have found in the quaint drawing-rooms of old Boston, or Philadelphia, or Georgetown, as well as upon his native soil, was an ingratiating gallant in many ways. He posed, because Napoleon was making it the fashion to pose, but he posed well, and he studied the best methods of saying caressing things without making them nauseatingly sweet. This art of compliment, of not saying the right thing to the wrong woman, nor the wrong thing to any woman, reached an interesting point of development in the contemporaries of Beau Brummel. Possibly Miss America would have liked a Beau Brummel in an artistic spirit, and Brummel had, as a spectacle, many traits of gracefulness and fascination. Her elusiveness would have piqued him and his not too grovelling deference would have made her think him an entertaining fellow. His dress was elegant without effeminacy, his hat was the most extraordinary yet devised by the ingenuity of man—which itself should be a bond of sympathy. But hats pass away, and beaux melt among the hazy images in the tapestry of time.
Yet they are always with us. 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.
And we must not forget, in considering courtship, that she, too, though she may not have greatly changed in fact, has produced an effect quite as puzzling as the change in man. One of the German painters, possibly under the influence of Sudermann, has shown the modern girl, assisted, and possibly instigated by Cupid, paring hearts with a knife. But this is an old partnership—Cupid & Co., Limited. I cannot say what sign the firm puts up over the door in Germany. In this country it certainly should read: “Hearts extracted without pain.”
Yes, she is cool. The caterer’s sign “Weddings Furnished,” does not, I fear, ever give her a thrill. She asks no one to furnish a wedding for her. She seldom appears to be in the mental situation described by the thought-curers as one of “intense expectancy.” And she is, it must be frankly admitted, developing a keen, a disconcerting, critical sense, an inevitable result to be sure, yet carrying its own bewildering effects. This is the American spirit, the inquiring spirit, the tendency to insist upon the re-establishment of standards. The American girl always is in the attitude of being willing to admit the superiority of man—if he can prove it. Here enters her Americanism. Her contention is that you cannot transmit relativity. She summons science to show that new criteria are necessary, and she continually is calling man into the lists to defend his titles, to repeat his victories, or surrender the trophies.
