When, therefore, we apply to American life the characters, motives, and manners of European social existence, we make an egregious blunder. The aristocracy of Europe, mainly of England, is not one of wealth alone, for many commoners are richer than their lords. Nor is it of pedigree, for the great majority of them are without such. It is the power of a hereditary class. It dominates not only the social but the political structure as well. The lords we look up to and dwell upon, so fascinated, are the masters, and, relieved from the necessary toil for an existence, have time and means to be cultured.
It is a class with the prestige of power. Take this away, and a lord would be no more than the ring-master of a circus, and not half so amusing as the clown.
Our social aristocrats play at being such, and are ring-masters and clowns, admired by the ignorant and laughed at by all.
Again, there is no class in the United States that has the leisure necessary to learn. We have no idle class. We have a continuous stream of would-be aristocrats, but they come and go so rapidly that no time is given for the cultivation of manner, nor can there be the repose necessary to aristocratic ways. The duration of family life on Murray Hill, or any other fashionable locality in New York or elsewhere, is that of the penitentiary or the car-horse—about five years. All the families change in that time. Whence they come they carefully conceal; whither they go no one cares to learn. There are enormous fortunes made in a day, that disappear in a night.
All the while the money-getting and -losing continue. There is no pause. The masculine element of such society is made up of men who carry the anxieties of their work into parlors and ball-rooms. The late dinners and later parties are frequented by fathers and brothers who know that at counting-rooms and offices they must be every morning by ten o'clock, to worry all day with an anxiety that kills. These noble scions of male American aristocracy carry protested notes on their dyspeptic countenances, and the female specimens their bills for jewelry and gorgeous wearing apparel. The surface of the whole creation is not even good veneer, but the thinnest sort of a scratched varnish.
What absurd fictions, then, are our society novels!
We have in reality our social life, and it is of the best and highest. The millions of homes over the land have their comedies and tragedies well worth putting to record, but they are American, not European. Why cannot our gifted authors, such as Miss Mathews, for example, turn to these and give us a fiction worthy the name? The book she has given us, with all its defects, is entertaining. From title-page to close the interest in the plot and characters holds the reader who does not look too narrowly into the probability.
Of the same sort of work is the volume entitled That Girl from Texas, by Jeannette H. Walworth (Belford, Clarke & Co.), an amusing story under a bad name. The idea is not so original, as Sancho Panza remarked, but what we might have met it before. The "Fair Barbarian" who invades England and crops out in English novels, much to our discredit, and the like character from the far West who assaults fashionable life East, are getting to be somewhat monotonous. Society is shocked in both localities by the rough ways of the maiden; but as she is ever beautiful, rich, and shrewd, she plays a leading rôle and comes out victor in the end. If "Elmira does not stab that deep-dyed villain, the Count," she circumvents him in the most adroit and unexpected manner, so that virtue triumphs and vice is exposed and punished.
We cannot comprehend why it is that when a sprig of English nobility seeks our shores, he should always be a cad or an idiot, and in many instances blooming specimens of both. Time was when this specimen proved a fraud, and the so-called lord turned out a lackey. But now his ancestors are the real lace, but his intellect, morals, and manners are at a heavy discount.
Nor is it understandable why the newly rich of the far West are such ignorant boors, while the same articles at the East are refined and intellectual. We observe that the difference between the two is to have the Western man spell his words as they are pronounced, while all the correct spelling is given to the Eastern gentleman. This is scarcely fair to the citizen of means from a Texan ranch or a Nevada mine. But the dramatic effect is good, so we must not complain.