THE GREEN ROOM.
INSIDE THE WHITE HOUSE.—WASHINGTON.
The carpet on the East Room, last year, was presented to the United States by the Sultan of Turkey. It seemed like one immense rug, covering the entire floor, and filled the room with an atmosphere of comfort, grand, soft, and warm. The chairs and sofas are of carved wood, crimson cushioned. A handsome bronze clock ticks above one of the mantels, the others are adorned with handsome bronzes. The air is summer warm. On the whole, isn’t the people’s parlor a pleasant place? I never enter it, but comes back to me that tearful April morning when, in the centre of this floor, under the white catafalque, lay the body of Abraham Lincoln, dead. The crowd pressing in then, how different from this one! Rugged soldiers bent down and kissed his face and wept, women scattered flowers upon his breast, with their tears. Rich and poor, old and young, black and white, all crowded round his coffin, and wept for him,—one, only one, if the most august, of the martyrs of liberty.
Think what tales the room could tell, since the day when Abigail Adams dried her clothes from the weekly wash, in it, if it but had a tongue. Stand here, and see the stately procession move by. Believe in your own day, my dears. You need not go back to Sir Philip Sidney, to find a perfect gentleman, nor to David and Jonathan, to find faith and love between man and man, passing the love of woman, nor to the days of chivalry, to find true knights who would die for you. Here are men bearing, under all this glitter of gold and lace, bodies battered and maimed in their country’s cause. There, is a man, pouring foolish nothings into the ear of a foolish girl, who would die for the truth.
We are far from being a thorough-bred people. The census of spittoons is a horror in our land. We talk too loud, and too long; we gesticulate too much; we can not keep quiet. We need, at least, more capacity for repose, more unselfish consideration for the sensibilities of others, more of the golden rule, before we can flower into the perfection of fine breeding. Yet, no less here, are men at once strong and gentle, brave and tender, gallant and yet true. Here are all and more than Shakespeare’s women: Juliet, searching for her Romeo; Miranda, looking through her starry eyes for a “thing divine” even in the Red Room; tender Imogen; fair Titania; Portia, with hair of golden brown; and Desdemona, imprudent, fond, yet truth itself. Here is not only the beauty and the belle, but the sibyl, whose divining eyes beyond volition, strike below every sham and every falsehood.
Yet here, too, falls the shadow of human nature. There stand two ladies, whose supreme enjoyment here is “quizzing.” Among their thousand “dear friends” here, not one is too sacred to be ridiculed. One of these ladies, at least, would feel as if she had forfeited “her soul’s salvation,” if she were to go to the theatre, or to give countenance to a dance; but it does not occur to her, that she puts that precarious organ in the slightest peril, when she stands in a public assembly, and ridicules her friends.
These ladies are merely yielding to a vice which has grown with their years, strengthened with their strength, the vice that thrives amid Christian graces, the vice paramount of the Christian church. The most unkind people whom I have ever known, have been distinguished for an ostentatious sort of piety. The most uncharitable conclusions, the most pitiless judgments, the most merciless ridicule, that I have ever listened to, of poor human beings, I have heard from people high in the church, not from people of the so-called “world.” This, not because the normal human nature in either differs, but because the people of the world have a thousand outlets and activities which draw them away from microscopic inspection of the flaws in their neighbors; while ascetic pietists, denied legitimate amusements, shut out from innocent recreation, avenge their defrauded souls by feeding them on small vices. I offer no defence for a life of folly; there is nothing I should dread more, save a life of sin. Yet, if I were to make a choice, I would choose foolishness rather than meanness.
This lady, flashing by in many hues, represents what one sees continually in Washington—a new woman. Not new to the city merely, but new to position and honor. These are but slight external accidents to a nature that has ripened from within, drawing culture, refinement, and dignity out of the daily opportunities of retired life. But, when the public position is all that gives the honor, how easy to tell it! There is all the difference in the quality of the put-on, puckering manner, and the simple dignity of real ladyhood, that there is between the quality of a persimmon and a pomegranate. All she has is new. She, herself, is new. Her bearing and her honors do not blend. There is no soft and fine shading of thought, of manner, of accent, of attire. The sun of prosperity may strike down to a rarer vein, and draw it outward, to tone down this boastful commonplace; but we must bear the glare, the smell of varnish, and the crackle of veneering, during the process.
When I was a very good little girl, I was allowed to read Mrs. Sherwood’s Lady of the Manor, on Sunday. I read, and thought that heaven on earth must be shut up in a manor house. When I grew to be a somewhat bigger girl, sailing down the Hudson, a manor house, rich in historic recollections, was pointed out to me. And here, in my summer-time, comes the lady of this manor house, drops her gentle courtesy, and gives me her hand, making more than real the enchanted story of childhood. The lady of the manor in crude Washington revives the stately graces of old days.
How quaint and rare they are! How I look and long for it; how glad I am when I find it,—that indefinable, yet ever-felt presence of fine womanliness, a thing as precious as the highest manliness,—each the rarest efflovescence of human nature. I confess to a clinging adoration for it, whether felt in the lady of the manor or in the sad-eyed woman who cleans my gloves. The womanliness that is not ashamed nor dissatisfied with womanhood, nor yet vain of it; the womanliness that gives us the gracious, blending dignity and sweetness of wisdom and humility, of self-respect and reticence, of spirituality and tenderness—that ineffable charm of femininity, which is the counterpart and crown of manhood, in very distinction equal with it, each together maintaining in equilibrium the brain and soul of the human race.