A southern dance! Perhaps it is inevitable that we should find ourselves thinking of the Continental and early Federal society; of old Georgetown and the powdered heads, and the minuet, and the blinking candles behind the darkey orchestra; of the clinking swords of the young Revolutionary soldiers, and the satin breeches of the foreign lordlings, studying the precocious young republic and the young republic’s daughters: of the quaint gowns Miss America used to wear, and the taunting little caps and head-dresses, reflecting now the whimsies of the Empire, now the furbelows of the Restoration, and always her engagingly different self. Yes, time is working its wizard tricks up and down the land, slowly here and quickly there, now (as it might seem) in a romantic spirit, and again in brusque paradoxical contrast to the thing we expect.
We live quickly hereabouts, and to say that the vast changes which have taken place in our national life have been mostly external is not to say that the spectacle is on that account any easier to understand. In an especial degree social situation with us, like the age limit defining old maids, is wholly relative, subject to continual change. To the foreign spectator who ignores this relativity, the American girl naturally is bewildering, and we are likely to find her typified in foreign comment in the words which Schlegel irreverently applied to Portia, as a “rich, beautiful, clever heiress.” No, the typical American girls are not all heiresses, nor all cow-camp heroines. They were not always demure in the colonies, nor are they always disconcertingly self-possessed in our own time. The girls with whom Lafayette went sled-riding on the Newburg hills do not actually appear to have been amazingly different from those who teased the Prince of Wales in the fifties (I mean our fifties), nor from those who sent in their cards to Li Hung Chang in the nineties. It is very shocking to us moderns, who let women preach and plead and vote, to learn of the number of elopements in the days when women were theoretically tethered to the spinning-wheel and forbidden everything but hypocrisy. Which is to say, perhaps, that how much we shall regard as distinctive in the modern woman may depend upon how little we happen to know of the woman who has gone before.
But time and place must leave their mark, and Miss America, though she be like changeable silk, of varying hue in varying lights, is undoubtedly, being the precocious product of a new era in new territory, a new variety in the species, as new as if she were grotesquely instead of subtly different. And in her presence the American himself frequently seems to be awed and quelled, like the Greek hero when Athena’s “dreadful eyes shone upon him.” His devotion to her has excited derision; his deference has been misconstrued, his boastful admiration has been catalogued as characteristic. Italy once spoke of England as “the paradise of women”; and England in a later day began to say the same thing about the United States, which may or may not have something to do with the “star of empire,” and probably, in any case, has some definite relation to the Anglo-Saxon spirit, concerning which so much has been said of late. As for Miss America herself, the sovereignty at which the foreign observer marvels is a real appearance, however profound the misapprehension of its philosophy. 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 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 spirit, not because we expect actually to discover facts, but for the immediate pleasure of the speculation. We neither seek nor assume to comprehend this marvellous organism. We know better. When we pretend to delineate the American girl it is in the spirit of Fielding’s aside in “Tom Jones”: “We mention this observation not with any view of pretending to account for so odd a behavior, but lest some critic should hereafter plume himself on discovering it.”
II
THE TWIG
