The aristocrats

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

“Fog’s goin’ up the mountain, Miss,” he said. “Sure sign of rain; and I heard a cuckoo in the woods to-day, another sign as never fails. I guess them big fireplaces’ll come in handy for a day or two.” Fortunately we have plenty to read.

I forgot to tell you that Jemima, our erstwhile handmaiden, of whom I wrote you, and who is now “visiting” the lake-keeper’s family, yesterday brought me two charming offerings, a basket of wild strawberries from the meadow and a bunch of half-wild half-cultivated pink roses. I simply buried my face in the roses, their sweetness was so poignant, so delicious, that I wanted to inhale and absorb it all at once, and I pressed them to every bit of my face and neck. The strawberries, too, were so fragrant! such tiny things, but with a most agreeable acid sweetness. I have not seen Bertie enjoy anything so much for a long time; and when I could no longer smell my roses—alas! for the quick blunting of mortal sense!—I smothered Bertie’s face in their pink fragrance and enjoyed them again, vicariously.

24th

I received your first long letter last night and I have read it no less than four times. That proves a good many things, does it not?—that you write the most interesting letters in the world, that I am interested in all that concerns you, and that I have no other correspondent. Freddy certainly is amusing; there is a touch of farce in every tragedy; but I am glad you have not answered his effusions even sarcastically. And I am glad the days of duelling are over. It is true that V. R. would settle the whole question promptly, but then there would be a scandal, which has been avoided so far, and still can be, even with the inevitable divorce. But I know how hard it all is on you, and fancy-free as I am and always have been, I can well imagine that the separation is the hardest of all.

I am hoping my letters cheer and interest you. It is all so interesting to me, here in this wilderness of the new world—I feel exactly like one of the old colonials—that I love to write about it.

It has been storming for a week, cold and wind and rain; and we have spent the time in the living-room, about the big rock fireplace filled with blazing logs. We are very cosy within, and have plenty to read, and Bertie says he likes it for a change; but I never heard such howling furious winds. Every now and again there is a crash in the forest and I run to the window. But that wall of trees, with its branches to the ground, is impenetrable. It creaks and bends and grinds, and the beeches and maples shake wildly in the blast, but there is no rift. But I can imagine the wild scene, the ruin in those forest depths. What isolation! And how like the storms that rage in our inner life that no mortal eye ever glimpses. My woods suggest virgin sweetness no longer. That wall of wet angry leaves surrounding a blind furious struggle of forces, the writhing fighting trees raging at being assaulted by the elements, shrieking through the forest when they are overcome, the torn surface of the lake, all give me a feeling of delicious terror, and I wish that I were a poet.

Bertie, while we were in New York, subscribed for no less than seven newspapers, and Mr. Rogers kindly made me out a list of the best American novels of the past ten years, every one of which I bought. I have read the newspapers aloud to Bertie ever since our arrival, and during this week I have read—to myself; Bertie does his own novel reading,—just twenty-six works of American fiction. After a two week’s course of the newspapers I had come to the conclusion that the United States was the most full-blooded nation the world had ever known; bursting with virility and energy, a great lusty young giant, full of good and bad, sophisticated, but so busy as to have retained a certain native ingenuousness; its cities presenting the very extremes of virtue and vice; the monotony of its Western farms varied by picturesque desperadoes;—but I have wandered from my simile: I was trying to say that the young giant was an extraordinary compound of primeval passions, with the force that those passions alone are the mainspring of, and the sophistication which the old world flung into his brain the day his eyes saw the light; a little like a raging lion with the soul of a man. In some of the newspapers these extremes meet; in others I find either the intense conservatism or the rampant radicalism which are bound to be in this country of extremes; but in even an old fogy like the Morning——[A] I find the same suggestion, doubtless because young men write for it, although under a restraint that has evidently never been heard of in the offices of the Morning——.[A]

But the literature of the country! It would give one a precisely opposite impression of “Americanism.” It is true that in England I had read three or four American novels that seemed to me full of blood and life, but I infer they are not literature, for they are not on Mr. Rogers’ list (he inherited, grew up in, one of the three or four distinguished publishing houses of the country, so I suppose he knows), and, judging from these twenty-six novels, I should, had Bertie failed to subscribe for those papers, have concluded that the United States was in about the middle stage of anæmia, not yet in the pernicious stage, but with blood dangerously watered. These books, judging by the extracts from reviews at the back, and the number of editions quoted, have been lauded by the critics, and well patronised by the public—the same public which makes up the component parts of the lusty young giant. I must say I cannot see him reading his literature. It is superlatively well written; frequently it has brilliancy and style and form; the touch of both men and women is, often, almost elusively delicate; the conversations sprightly and epigrammatic; the sentiments most proper and elevated; the side of life shown is almost invariably life as it ought to be, not as it is; nobody’s taste is offended, nobody is told anything he ought not to know (he can learn all that every day in the newspapers, some of which claim to have a million readers); they are always readable and seldom commonplace. But they never by any chance forsake the obvious. Altogether, one feels in the most excellent, elegant, irreproachable company, for even in a story of the slums, or one containing, perchance, an irregular baby, the author keeps you close to himself and whispers it all to you; he never lets the objectionable directly offend your sensitive soul. I now am inclined to believe that old story of the drawers on the piano legs. What is the keynote of this American literature? I have hunted for it industriously and talked it over with Bertie. We both have come to the conclusion that it is intended to be “aristocratic.” That is the only way in which we can explain the literature of this most strenuous and vigorous of nations. High above the hurly-burly certain of its cultivated members, gifted with a pretty trick of words, are endeavouring to create a rarefied atmosphere which only the elect can enter, where those that do enter prove themselves to be of the elect. Roast beef, roast goose, plum pudding and burgundy, bread and butter and potatoes, apples and Yorkshire pudding are never served; only the entrees, the thin red and white wines that warm gently, but never intoxicate; champagne at rare intervals, and never, Oh, never! in my lady’s slipper;—the most dainty and expensive sweets, ice-creams of exceptional make, never common vanilla or chocolate, and occasionally—I should have put it first—a ducky little cutlet; birds, of course, caviare, and—Oh, I had forgotten, no pie. Pie is a universal taste, therefore bourgeois, like roast beef. And Bertie and I are so devoted to roast beef, and have formed almost a passion for pie! Bertie says he will lie and count the leaves on the trees before he will read another, and even Agatha says they are unsatisfactory, and that she prefers sermons—occasionally she reads one aloud to us! I never have taken kindly to this form of literature, but I really think, with all their obsolete ideas, they have more substance, more inside, than these lively, modern, educational, elegant, but—timid novels. I wonder if that is the word and why? I’ll ask Mr. Rogers.

Two or three of the newspapers, as I told you are stately and conservative, and I notice that their review columns have the exact tone of the literature. I was told in New York that their sales were small but intensely aristocratic—so much so that a popular politician could not afford to be seen with one—and that the sensational papers had enormous circulations, and were by no means ignored by “the very best people,” that they did good by exposing the “crooked” methods of monopolists and all sorts of abuses, and that they wielded an immense political influence—also that many of the creators of the nation’s bloodless masterpieces wrote occasionally for them—for a high consideration—and were not averse from reaching the larger audience. It now comes back to me, I once heard that there is an immense sale in the United States for the sort of literature forbidden by our County Council. Yet there is no law to suppress these plague-laden rats burrowing in the cellars of the social structure. It seems to me that we are more advanced, after all. We know the world and frankly admit it. No book frightens us if it is written by a man whose gifts and whose experience fit him to write for people who demand that good taste alone shall be the line of cleavage between the real and the ideal of life, who knows that we want truth and not polite fibs, but the truths that lie in red roast beef and rich warm wine, not in some nasty mess washed down by rum—nor yet diseased livers and absinthe. From these last, indeed, we have the County Council to protect us, we have only to reject the dull and the imported thin, and to encourage frankly those who add to our knowledge of life and mature our minds. The exceptional man and woman sees, comes into contact with phases of life that the average mortal never brushes. It is, I hold, their duty to tell all they know; their only lookout is to tell it for the sane not for the erotic mind. The great writers of the Past all have proved that, given the proper treatment, there is no subject yet evolved on earth that cannot be discussed. But I should say that the great Writers of the Past had never been imported to the United States. Perhaps they were carefully edited and put into drawers first.

By the way, talking of the strange inconsistencies of this country, I have noticed much the same quality in the many American women who have visited England from time to time, some of whom I have known rather well. When they have a lover—and they usually have as far as I am able to judge—they appear to be so frightened that people will find it out. They say and do the most absurd things to throw you off the track. Such unnecessary little explanations and subterfuges—as if any one cared! We are almost frank about our immoralities, carrying things off with a high hand and contemptuously daring any one to question us. I am not an upholder of immorality, and, so far as I have seen, it carries little happiness with it—neither does virtue, for that matter. What does? Living on a mountain top and dreaming of ideals?—and I would advise women generally to avoid the complications as long as they can, above all the heartache for the man whom no legal tie is always bringing back to them; but I think an insolent admission of it far preferable to hypocrisy, and not nearly so demoralising. All the Americans I have known seemed to me to be constantly striving for something they had not, for a notch above. I believe that originally it was the ideal the young republicans, in common with their republic, strove for, but now I think they are all ashamed of being middle-class and trying to be aristocratic, and they fancy that to be elegantly correct and proper is a part of the game. Oh, dear! Oh, dear! How little they know.