Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

But it is of the intellectual and social value of the club that I wish more especially to speak here. It is often asked by thoughtful foreigners why American women, who are free to pursue any career they like, with ample privileges of education and the universal reign of the literary club, have produced no writers of the first order, measured even by the standards of their own sex. One finds many clever ones, and a few able ones, but no Jane Austen, no George Eliot, no Mme. de Staël, no Mrs. Browning. This may be partly due to the fact that we have not yet passed the period of going to school. It is possible that another generation, reared in the stimulating atmosphere of this, may give us some rare flower of genius, if its mental force be not weakened by the general pouring-in process, or dissipated in the modern tendency toward limitless expansion and dilution. But club life in itself is not directly favorable to creative genius. The qualities of the imagination never flourish in crowds, though a certain order of talent does flourish there—a talent that brings quicker returns and more immediate consideration, at far less cost. The salon made brilliant and versatile women who were noted for conversation and diplomacy; it made charming women who ruled men and affairs through rare gifts of administration, tempered with intelligent sympathy and tact; it made executive women, and finely critical women, and masterful women, who left a strong and lasting impression upon the national life: but, though they lived in the main intellectual current of their time, stimulated and inspired its leaders, and had much to do with its direction, they seldom made a serious effort in literature themselves. The few who have left a name in letters only illustrate the fact that individual genius is a flower of another growth. Mme. de Staël would have been a great woman under any conditions; but we owe all of her best work in literature to her exile from the social life of Paris, where her thoughts had no time to crystallize. The gift of Mme. de Sévigné was nearly allied to a conversational one, but her mind was matured and deepened during years of seclusion under the lonely skies of Brittany. Mme. de la Fayette left the world of the salons early, to find her literary inspiration in the solitude of ill health and the stimulating friendship of La Rochefoucauld. Mme. du Châtelet, whose talent was of another color, wrote on philosophy and translated Newton, not in the breezy air of the salons, but in the tranquil shades of Cirey and the less tranquil society of Voltaire. There were other women who wrote, though they usually chose to hide a light which was not a very brilliant one, and to shine in other ways. It may be that it was the salon which made these women possible, as it created an intellectual atmosphere in which thought blossomed into intense and vivid life; but its direct tendency was to foster in women talents of a quite different sort from creative ones. It developed to a high degree, however, the fine discrimination and critical sense which led Rousseau to say that “a point of morals would not be better discussed in a society of philosophers than in that of a pretty woman of Paris.”

The clubs have hardly lived long enough to justify a final judgment as to their outcome; but the best writers of our own time have not been, as a rule, actively identified with them, though a few, whose minds were already formed in another school, have had much to do in founding and leading them. The many able women who have given their time and talents to the clubs have oftener merged their literary gifts, if they had them, into work of another sort, not less valuable in its way, but less tangible and less individual. It is the work of the general, who plans, organizes, sifts values, adapts means to definite ends, but who lives too much in the swift current of affairs to give heed to the voice of the imagination, or to master the art of literary form which alone makes for thought a permanent abiding-place.

But if the clubs do not produce great creative writers,—who, after all, are born, not made,—they furnish a multitude of ready ones, and an army of readers who are likely to have a dominant voice in the taste of the next generation. The result is certain to be—indeed, is already—a voluminous literature. The quantity of a thing, however, does not insure its fine quality; oftener the reverse. Naturally, the question of standards becomes one of grave importance, unless we are ready to accept the rule of the average, which more than offsets the rise of the lowest by the fall of the highest, with an ultimate tendency downward. We grow in the direction of our ideals, and these are measured by the height of our standards. That many of the clubs have exalted ideals, and are doing a great deal of valuable work, is not a matter of doubt. It is equally certain that some of them work with a zeal that is not according to knowledge, through lack of capable leaders, and through a fallacy, nowhere so fatal as in art and letters, that the wish to do a thing is equivalent to a talent for doing it.

There is no doubt that American women read and discuss books enough. It may be that we read too many. One may devour books as one does bonbons, and with little more profit. Nor is there any doubt that we write papers enough and hear talks enough on every imaginable subject, from the antediluvians to Imperialism and the Chinese question. To whatever all this mental activity may lead, it does not always lead to culture, even of the mind, and I take the word, unqualified, to include much more. It does lead to a broad diffusion of intelligence, but there is an essential difference between intelligence and culture. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is quite possible, in running after the one, to run away from the other. The woman who belongs to ten or twelve clubs in order to be of the new age, and to learn enough of all sorts of things to be able to talk about them, may find her social compensation and a harmless way of amusing herself, if she likes that sort of amusement; but if she aims at mental culture, that is another affair. It is not a matter of facts and phrases and formulas that one goes in search of, but an inward growth, the result of long and loving companionship with the best thought of the world, which is not at all the same thing as a flitting acquaintance with a multitude of subjects, or the ability to talk glib platitudes about the latest fads in art or science or literature. Such companionship is found to only a limited extent in gatherings of any sort; but stimulus and inspiration may be found there, and here lies the true intellectual value of the club. To thoughtful and sincere women, who have a certain amount of training and natural gifts of assimilation, with small facilities for contact with the thinking world, it is a priceless boon. But to narrow and untrained intellects that like to flit from one thing to another, content with a flying glimpse and a telling point or two which will go far toward making them seem wise to the uninitiated, there are large possibilities in the way of what we may call imitation culture. It is simply another outlet for the ambition of the parvenu who puts on costly clothes and rare jewels in the comfortable assurance that “fine feathers make fine birds.”

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.