From the Easy Chair, Volume 2

by George William Curtis

The writer certainly seems to describe by contrast, but he has wisely left a little cloud in which to envelop his retreat in case of emergency. Certainly we need not press him. Whatever he may think or say of the English girl, he has spoken well and truly of her American sister. His description applies to the girl who grows up amid the average conditions of American life, the girl who is portrayed in her more jejune condition in Henry James's Daisy Miller. The two chief qualities of that young woman, as represented by the shrewd and subtle artist, are self-respect and self-reliance. The perplexity of the phenomenon to the foreign reader lies in the fact that she does what the European girl without self-respect does.

A distinguished writer in New York, no longer living, once said to the Easy Chair, with an air of consternation: "Do you know that the best girls in New York go without escort to the matinées at the Academy? Goodness knows what will be the end of it!" The good man was seriously troubled. He seemed to apprehend that the young woman who could go to a matinée without an escort would probably run off with a circus troupe, and presently ride—in a very short skirt—bare-backed horses in the ring. He evidently felt that the young women whom he had seen were in grave danger of losing maidenly reserve, and that their conduct betrayed a want of refinement of feeling. The secret of his alarm lay in the fact that the social conventions of foreign society had acquired in his mind the force of rules of morality. He shared the feelings of the delightful lady who remarked that in her opinion it was immodest to go abroad without gloves. Nothing is more common than this confusion of mind, and one of the advantages of genuinely American society is that it dissipates such illusions. The Lady Mavourneen, who was familiar with the finest society both in France and England, said that the respect shown to women in this country was so sincere and universal that she should not hesitate to cross the continent alone. Why, then, should the Easy Chair's friend have been troubled that young women went unattended to the concert at the Academy? Every man there would have been their instant defender against insult. But they went, and they were allowed to go, because the insult was more improbable than fire, while the defence was sure.

In what is called distinctively society in large cities there is a great deal of the feeling evinced by the observer at the Academy. There is abundant regard for misplaced conventions. Young women in Vienna and Paris who go unattended are generally working-women or another class, and as working-women are not respected by Lovelace and Lothario, they are exposed to insult. To avoid the chance of insult, therefore, a young woman must have an escort in a partially civilized city like Paris or Vienna. But no presumption lies against any woman in America. Her self-respect and self-reliance are unquestioned, and American women, old and young, are perpetually passing in railway trains by day and night from one part of the country to another, unsuspected and unsuspecting.

In a country where social classes are not permanent or rigidly defined, as hitherto in America they have not been, the daughter as well as the son of the house contemplates the possibility of self-support. In such a country the harem view of the sphere and occupation of woman, however modified, wholly disappears. The word "obey" gradually vanishes from the marriage service, or is smoothed away by interpretation. The ideal of woman changes, and, as we think in America, improves. All the excellent qualities which the London writer attributes to the American girl spring from this change, from social conditions which foster self-respect and self-reliance. The demand of the suffrage, the rise of the woman's college, the challenge to the great universities to lift up their gates that woman may come in, show no decline of the feminine ideal of woman, but its transformation from the fancy of a goddess or a toy into the old Scriptural conception of the helpmeet.

The British matron, as she scrutinizes what she may hold to be an invader of her realm, will not find that in any feminine quality or grace, even to the most exquisite taste in dress, or delicate charm of manner, or essential refinement of mind, Pocahontas defers to Boadicea. Where the American imitates the English or any other, as when the English girl affects the French, she must suffer from the inevitable inferiority of all imitation. When her self-reliance is boisterous, or without tact and fine perception, Daisy Miller will be as crude and distasteful as Lady Clara Vere de Vere is heartless and cruel. But Rosalind and Viola and Beatrice, and Tennyson's Eleanore and Adeline and Margaret, meet in the American a sister of the same lineage as their own, bred in an atmosphere most fortunate and fair.

ANNUS MIRABILIS.

HIS year, the centenary of the opening of our national constitutional epoch, will be a Washington year. As on a saint's day there is a special service in his honor, so through all this year there will be especial remembrance of Washington, and natural self-congratulation that in him we have a glory beyond that of other nations. The last striking tribute to him is also most timely, for it is that of Mr. Bryce in his "American Commonwealth," whose publication happily coincided with the opening of this annus mirabilis. He says, in speaking of Hamilton's death, "One cannot note the disappearance of this brilliant figure, to Europeans the most interesting in the earlier history of the republic, without the remark that his countrymen seem to have never, either in his lifetime or afterward, duly recognized his splendid gifts." The explanation of this seeming want of appreciation is, however, very characteristic, for it lies in the instinctive American regard for morality.

Mr. Bryce touches it when he proceeds: "Washington, indeed, is a far more perfect character. Washington stands alone and unapproachable, like a snow-peak rising above its fellows into the clear air of morning, with a dignity, constancy, and purity which have made him the ideal type of civic virtue to succeeding generations. No greater benefit could have befallen the republic than to have such a type set from the first before the eye and mind of the people." That benefit is incalculable, and it will be acknowledged with every form of stately ceremonial and of eloquent enthusiasm during this year.

The great event of 1789 was Washington's inauguration as President, and it is the most important event in the annals of the city. The cosmopolitan character of the city from its settlement and in the early time of the little town, when it was said that more than a dozen different languages were spoken in its streets, down to the present, when it is the third or fourth city in size upon the globe, has always checked the sentiment of local pride which is so great a force in the development of a community. Among all the original States New York has seemed to care least for its significant events and its great men. That the Revolution was tactically largely a contest for the control of the Hudson, that the contest culminated at Saratoga, and that the new national order which resulted from the Revolution began in the city of New York, are facts which are known, indeed, but which have not grown into a proud tradition universally cherished and constantly repeated and celebrated like similar great events in New England.