And in the same way our notion of the American girl, of the typical American girl, is inevitably affected by the pictures we see of her. Our illustrators naturally have the best opportunity to mould our judgments in this matter. I recall hearing one woman say of another at a tea: “That girl is always sitting around in Gibson poses.” They used to say the same thing in England of the girls who imitated Du Maurier. Thus we see that the illustrator of life not only is reflecting but creating forms and manners; and if you would know not merely what the American girl is, but what she is going to be, study the picture-makers and story-makers who influence her.
Mr. Gibson would have us believe that Miss America is essentially a statuesque girl, that, in general, there are good chances that she will be tall, commanding, well-dressed, rather English in the shoulders. Mr. Wenzell and Mr. Smedley present her to us as more willowy, with more of what, if we had to go abroad for a prototype, we should be obliged to call French grace and lightness. We have been under the spell of the girl Castaigne can draw, have enjoyed the dainty femininity pictured by Toaspern and Sterner and Mrs. Stephens. None has grudged a flattering stroke, a prophetic outline. It is the old story. If we are to measure a nation’s civilization by the degree of its deference to women, we surely shall find much to confuse us in art, which in all lands, like some joyous, enthusiastic child, always has heaped unstinted homage at the feet of its goddesses, its Madonnas, its Magdalens and its nymphs; which always has been ready to give to its fruit-venders and flower-girls in the market-place the same refined beauty it bestows upon its princesses; which has made its Pandoras beautiful with no sign of resentment for any mischief its Pandoras ever may have done, grateful only for the privilege of saying to the world as to her precious private self, that she is very charming indeed. Germany, while sending women to the plough, paints her radiantly as a deity, and when England was selling wives at the end of a halter in the market-place, there was no abatement in the ardor of her artistic tributes to feminine loveliness.
While the American artist has painted Miss America appreciatively, with an enthusiasm creditable alike to his art and to his patriotism, and seldom, surely, in the spirit of one who could say, “she is rather stiff just now,” unquestionably, like the rest of us, he has been bothered at times by the fact that she is so various, that she has so many pictorial as well as temperamental and (may I say) vocal variations.
There are several reasons why she should be various. The “Mayflower” was a small ship and could not hold all of our ancestors. Like the English who followed after the Conqueror, some of our ancestors had to be content to “come over” at a later time, some of them at a shockingly recent date. Thus we have greater divergences in type than exist in countries wherein the “coming over” process was neither so protracted nor from so many points of the compass. The American girl blossoms like the pansy in so many and in such unexpected shades and combinations that science falters, and bewildered art, determined to paint types that will “stay put,” bolts for Brittany and sulkily draws sabots and the Norman nose. We are a vast anthropological department store in which the polite sociological clerk will show you human goods, not only in the primary colors, but in every conceivable tint and texture; and when you ask him, Is this foreign or domestic? he lies to meet the requirements. Yes, Miss America sometimes, like our cotton, “comes over” a second time with a foreign label, which is puzzling!
It is our habit to think that the American girl of English ancestry presents precisely the right modification of the—what shall I call it?—austerity of the purely English type, and which scorns the melancholy of Burne-Jones and Rossetti. The American girl of German parents is conspicuously with us, and very often is found supplying a fascinatingly fair phase without which our galaxy scarcely would be complete, adding a delightful sparkle to the demureness which we might not find so modified in Berlin or Bremen. The American girl of French parentage is found uniting the traits of the people which has produced De Staël, and Récamier and George Sand, to the perhaps not greatly different vivacity of l’Américaine. We trace the auburn tresses of the Scottish lass, the teasing Irish eyes, the winsome oval of the Dutch face. We see the too emphatic contrasts of the Spanish, the Italian and the Russian types mellowed and refined; while Oriental blood, the civilized African, the octoroon and the occasional Asiatic each add an element of picturesque variety.
And this is not saying a word about the differentiating fact that this is a big country, and that Miss America in one section is by no means the same as Miss America in another. I do not mean to say that when we meet her in or from Boston we always know her by sight, but when we come to average her in that neighborhood we are able to see clearly enough that her quality is distinctive, that it is different from the quality of Miss America elsewhere—in New York, for example, where, by a trivial tradition, she is supposed to lay less stress upon intellectuality, but where, under whatever guise of habit or manner, you will find that she knows enough and has what she knows sufficiently at her command to make you nervous. Again, the Philadelphia girl upsets your preconceived notions, if you are foolish enough to have these, by being nothing that suggests even remote relationship to the bronze Quaker on the municipal tower. It is the familiar joke that the Boston girl asks what you know, that the New York girl asks what you own, and that the Philadelphia girl asks who your grandfather was. If this amiable satire should have any foundation in fact, I wonder what the Chicago girl is expected to ask. I myself have a theory, not wholly dissociated from experience, that she does not ask anything, being content to know that she, personifying the great traditionless middle west, has been called the hardest riddle of them all.
And, as I have said, we must admit that geography has much to do with the case. 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? Have you heard the Creole sing? Have you heard the music of the Georgia girl’s talk? Have you ever let a Virginia girl drive you, or danced with Miss Maryland?