Woman in the golden ages

by Amelia Gere Mason

It is by no means necessary, or even desirable, that every woman belonging to a club should be a savante; indeed, considering the number of the clubs, I am not sure that this would not bring about a more deplorable state of affairs than if there were none at all. It may even be better for the average woman to know a little about many things than all about one thing, if she has a certain discrimination as to values, and the fine sense of proportion which is the result of more or less mental training. But it is desirable that each one should have at least a little knowledge of what she undertakes to write or talk about. Why a woman who might have something to say concerning certain phases of our colonial life should be asked to write a paper on Greek art, of which she has not even read, much less thought, or one who is more or less familiar with various pleasant corners of English literature should be called upon to entertain her hearers on the Italian Renaissance, of which she knows nothing whatever, is one of the mysteries of the new era. “I am so glad to see you,” said one woman to a friend whom she met on the street. “I have a paper to write on the symbolists. You know all about such things. What are the symbolists, anyway?” We are told that when the blind lead the blind, both are likely to come to grief. It is needless to say that these faults are not universal, as there is a great deal of careful study and fine thought in the clubs, but they are sufficiently common to be noted among things to be avoided.

A still more serious danger lies in the endless multiplication of clubs, which offers an irresistible temptation to those who like to cull a little here, and a little there, without too exacting effort in any direction. They may all be valuable in themselves, but because it is good to belong to one or two active clubs of different aims, it does not follow that it is good to belong to a dozen; and I know of a woman who claims with pride that she belongs to twenty-two! “Moderation is the charm of life,” said Jean Paul, and one sees with regret how little of that sort of charm there is left; indeed, I am not sure that it has not ceased to be considered a charm. We may find a note of warning in the later days of the great salons. The social life of the eighteenth century reads like a page of our own, with its whirl of conversazioni, its talks on science, its experiments in chemistry, physiology, psychology, its mania for discussing literature, art, and philosophy. The literary salons had blossomed into great centers of intellectual brilliancy, of which all this life was the natural pendant. It was the fashion then, as now, for women to concern themselves with affairs of state; to talk of the rights of man, though they had less to say than we have about the rights of woman; to dream of a social millennium, which they were doomed to wade through rivers of blood without reaching. They too invaded the secrets of the laboratory, and even the surgeon’s domain. We hear of a young countess who carried a skeleton in her trunk when she went on a journey, “as one might carry a book to read,” in order to study anatomy. These women, like ourselves, aimed to know a little of everything. They too were fired with the passion for intelligence and the passion for multitudes. With the craving for novelties came the ever-growing need of a stronger spice to make them palatable. In this carnival of the mind they lost their faith and simplicity, loved with their brains instead of their hearts, forgot their natural duties, and found natural ties irksome. Longing for rest without the power to rest, they suffered from maladies of the nerves, and were devoured with the ennui of exhaustion. Life lost its equilibrium, and the result was inevitable. The reaction from the restlessness of an intellect that is not fed from inner sources, but finds its stimulus and theater alike in the world, was toward an exaggeration of the sensibilities. “If I could become calm, I should believe myself on a wheel,” said one whose brilliancy had dazzled a generation. This fatal “too much” was not the least of the causes that lost to women the empire they had won. All movements are measured, in the end, by a standard of common sense, and reactions are in proportion to the deviation from a just mean. The revolution which brought liberty to men, or at least shifted the burdens to some one else, deprived women of what they had. They were forbidden to organize, and sent back to the fireside and cradles. The republic swept away from them the last vestige of political power, and gave them nothing in the place of their lost social kingdom. They were forced to speak with hushed voices in hidden coteries. Of these there were always a few, but their prestige was gone. “There is one thing which is not French,” said Napoleon; “it is that a woman can do as she pleases.” And he proceeded straightway to give point to his theory by exiling the ablest woman in France and silencing all the rest.

We are apt to take high moral ground on the frivolity of these women, and to pride ourselves on our superiority because we have such a serious way of amusing ourselves—so serious, indeed, that we forget there can be anything so questionable as frivolity about it. To be sure, the clubs are free from many of the faults of the salons. They do not put social conventions in the place of principles, nor substitute an esthetic conscience for an ethical one; nor do they drift at all in the direction of moral laxity. A movement of the intellect, too, which has its roots in the character is more likely to last than one that hangs on the suffrage of those it was meant to please and glorify. But we have the same mental unrest, the same thirst for excitement, the same feverish activity, the same indisposition to stay at home with our thoughts. A fever of the intellect may be preferable to a fever of the senses, and less harmful as an epidemic, but it tends equally toward exhaustion and disintegration. It is not so much a question of morals as a question of balance. The modern fashion, however, of doing everything, even to thinking, in masses, is not altogether due to a fever of the intellect, any more than it was a hundred years ago. Much of it is doubtless due to a genuine love of knowledge, much of it to a haunting desire to be doing something in the outside world, though the thing done be possibly not at all worth the doing; but a great deal of it is due to a sort of hyperæsthesia of the social sentiment, or the mental restlessness that betrays a lack of poise and depth in the character. We call it the spirit of the age—the innocent phantom which has to bear the burden of most of our sins, and is gathering so resistless a force that the strongest and wisest are swept along, despite themselves, in its accelerating course. But the spirit of the age is only the sum of individual forces. It needs only a sufficient number of wise counter-forces to temper and modify it.

VI

A word as to another phase of the club. We have seen that the salons broke through the exclusive lines of rank, and created a society based largely upon standards of the intellect, with a meeting-point of good manners. The woman’s club has done a similar work toward preventing the crystallization of American society on the basis of wealth. Its standards are professedly of the mind, though they are flexible enough to include a wide range of ability, aspiration, and small distinctions of various sorts. It would be too much to say that these elements are fused into anything like a homogeneous society; but they have a recognized point of contact that suffices for literary or charitable aims, though not altogether for social ones, which demand the larger contact of personal sympathies, and a certain community of language that comes within the province of manners. The salons, however, were wise enough to establish and maintain the social equilibrium between men and women, while the clubs seem to be rapidly destroying it. Outside of a limited dinner-giving, amusement-loving circle, it is undeniable that our social life is centering largely in clubs composed exclusively of women, whose tastes are diverging more and more from those of men, and in the functions growing out of them. To these we may add a few receptions with a sprinkling of men, and an endless procession of teas and luncheons with no men at all. Private entertaining of a general character, with its varying flavor of individuality, seems likely, with many other pleasant things, to become a memory. If these clubs grew out of a state of affairs in which women were virtually excluded from the intellectual life of men, we are fast drifting toward the reverse condition, in which men will have no part in the intellectual and very little in the social life of women.

Whether this marked separation of interests beyond a reasonable point be for the good of either men or women, is a matter of grave doubt. It is certain that women who are brought into frequent contact with the minds of men think more clearly and definitely, look at things in a larger way, and do a finer quality of intellectual work, than those who have been limited mainly to the companionship of their own sex. Societies of women are apt to fail in breadth through too much attention to technicalities out of season, to sacrifice the greater good to personal prejudices, to emphasize a little brief authority, to grow hard rather than strong, to become carping and critical without the clearness of vision that gives a rational basis for criticism. Nor does the fact that a great many women are superior to these limitations, and that men are not invariably free from them, affect the general drift of things. On the other side, it is equally true that men have done the greatest work under the influence of able women, from the days of Pericles and the great Greeks who found a fresh inspiration in the salon of Aspasia, to the brilliant men of modern times, too numerous to cite here, who have not failed to acknowledge their debt to feminine judgment and criticism. Men, too, are naturally averse to the trammels of form, and, left to themselves, rapidly lose the refinement and courtesy that came in with the social reign of women. While the best of each is drawn out through social contact on the plane of the intellect, the worst is accented by separation.

Then, aside from the fact that a large part of the happiness of the world depends upon a certain degree of harmony in the tastes of men and women, which is not likely to exist if they have utterly divergent points of social interest, men are an incontestable factor in all our plans for bettering matters, themselves included. We cannot fairly claim to constitute more than half of the human family, and, if we do not make some social compromise, we may share the fate of the Princess Ida, and see all of our fine schemes melt away like the fabric of a dream. We are not yet ready to establish an order of intellectual vestals, though drifting in that direction; and, since the women’s clubs do really constitute a distinct social life, why not make them more effective on that side? Why leave all these possibilities of power in the hands of those who make a business of amusing themselves? It is a fashion to rail at society as frivolous; but it is precisely what we make it, and it is ruled by women. If it tends to grow vapid, and luxurious, and commercial, and artificial, we have only to plan something as attractive on a finer and more natural basis. And where do we find a better starting-point than in connection with the women’s clubs? To be sure, men do not, as a rule, find them interesting; indeed, they vote them a trifle dull, but that may be because they have no vital part in them. Then, the fault may lie a little in the women themselves. There is clearly a flaw somewhere in our methods or our ideals. In trying to avoid the frivolities of society, we may fall into the equally fatal error of failing to make better things attractive, and so permit the busy men of to-day to slip away altogether from the influence of what many are pleased to call our finer moral and esthetic sense—to say nothing of what we lose ourselves. It may be deplorable, but it is still a fact, that truth is doubly captivating when served with the piquant sauces that make even error dangerously fascinating. We have to deal with people as they are, not as we think they ought to be.

I am not disposed to quote the Frenchwomen of a century or so ago as models. But there are many points we might take from them in the art of making a social life on intellectual lines agreeable, as well as a vital force. When women who are neither young nor beautiful dominate an age of brilliant men through intellect and tact, it does no harm to study their methods a little in an age when women of equal talent, superior education, and finer moral aims succeed to only a limited extent in doing more than stimulate one another—a good thing to do, but not final. Those women, too, had old distinctions to reconcile, and a powerful court for a rival. They had one advantage, as they made a cult of esprit, which is a gift of their race, while we make a cult of knowledge, which may be more substantial, but is less luminous, and not so available socially. Besides, knowledge is a thing to be acquired and not caviar to mediocrity, which is apt to use it crudely, and with pretension. “Let your studies flow into your manners, and your readings show themselves in your virtues,” said Mme. de Lambert. I am sorry to say that the typical Frenchwoman of a hundred years ago did not always take so exalted a view of her duties; but even as a matter of taste she had too delicate a sense of proportion to merge the woman in the intellect. She scattered about her the flavor of knowledge rather than the knowledge itself; which is not so easy, as one does not have the real flavor of knowledge without the essence of it, and something more. Rare natural gifts have a distinction of their own, but in ordinary life what one is counts for more than what one knows, and the secret of attraction lies rather in the sum of the qualities which we call character than in the acquirements. A woman may be familiar with Sanskrit, and calculate the distance of the fixed stars, without being interesting, or even admirable, as a woman. The main point is to preserve one’s symmetry, and one’s center of gravity; then, the more knowledge the better. It may be that the flaw in our ideals lies just here, and that in the too exclusive pursuit of certain things fine in themselves, we neglect other things equally if not more vital.

No doubt the Frenchwoman did much that she ought not to have done, and left undone much that she ought to have done, just as we do, though the things were not precisely the same; we know, too, that the time came when she did lose her poise, and with it her power. But, with all her faults, in the days of her glory she never forgot her point of view. She was rarely aggressive, and, without being too conscious of herself or her aims, it was a part of her esthetic creed to call out the best in others. With consummate tact, she crowned her serious gifts with the gracious ways and gentle amenities that disarmed antagonism and diffused everywhere a breath of sweetness. She carried with her, too, the sunshine that springs from an inexhaustible gaiety of heart, and this was one source of her unfailing charm. Perhaps it was partly why the literary salon retained its prestige for nearly two hundred years, and, in spite of its errors, was brilliant and amusing, as well as an intellectual force, to the end.

It is far from my intention to repeat the old cry that other days were better days, and other ways better ways, than ours. We have a life of our own, and do not wish to copy one that is dead, or to put on manners that do not fit us. But the essentials of human nature are eternally the same, and in bringing new forces to bear upon it we may do well sometimes to consult the wisdom of the past, to ponder the secret of its failures as of its successes. It is not a matter of depreciating our aims or our ways, but of getting the most out of them, perhaps through some subtle touch that we have missed; also of preserving our sanity and equilibrium in this new order of things, which tends always to grow more complex and more bewildering.