So far as the first aim is concerned, it is certainly most laudable, taken in one sense: the persons who can live in the midst of a people without endeavoring to gain an insight into its character and its customs must be possessed of an exceptionally oyster-like organization indeed. But the majority of American women seek foreign society on other grounds than this—chiefly from that tendency to ape everything European and to decry everything American to which I have already alluded as being characteristic of us as a nation. England and the English are the principal models chosen for imitation. It is marvellous to notice the fondness of American women abroad for the English accent and manner of speech and way of thinking; how enthusiastically they attend all the meets in Rome; how plaintively they tell one if one happens to have arrived quite recently from home, "Really, there is no riding across country in your America, you know." In the cities of the Continent that have large English and American colonies they attend the English church in preference to their own. I believe it is considered more exclusive to do so, and better form. In this mania for all things English we are not alone. John Bull happens to be the fashion of the day quite as much on the continent of Europe as in America, and has quite as many devoted worshippers there as among us.
Naturally, one of the chief reasons why American women have so great a liking for European society is to be found in the fact of the far more important position that married ladies occupy in that society than they do with us. For a woman who feels that she has still attractions which should not be buried in obscurity, but who has found that since her marriage she has, to all intents and purposes, been "laid upon the shelf," it is a very delightful experience to see herself once more the object of solicitous attention, considered as one of the brilliant central ornaments of a ballroom, not as one of its indispensable wall-decorations. The experience seems to be so particularly pleasant to the majority of American women, indeed, that they show the greatest disinclination to sharing it one with the other—a disinclination made manifest by that habit of reviling each other which I mentioned as the second great aim and occupation of our countrywomen abroad. That there should be very little kindness and fellow-feeling, and a great deal of envy, hatred, malice and all uncharitableness among their members, is characteristic of all foreign colonies in every country; but none certainly can, in this respect, surpass the American colonies in Europe, at least in so far as their feminine representatives are concerned. The extent to which these ladies carry their backbiting and slandering, and the abnormal growth which their jealousy of one another attains, fill the masculine mind with amazement.
A lady of a certain age who had lived in Europe twenty years, and who, in addition to being a person of great clearness and robustness of judgment, held a position, as a widow with a comfortable competency, which made her verdict unassailable by any suspicion of its being an interested one, spoke to me once on this subject. "In all my experience of American life in Europe," she said, "I may safely state that I have never met more than half a dozen American women who had anything but ill-natured remarks to make of one another. No American woman need hope, live as she may, do as she may, say what she may, to escape criticism at the hands of her countrywomen. The mildest manner in which they will treat her in conversation will be to say that she is 'nobody,' 'never goes anywhere,' etc., and thus dismiss her. In every other case it is, 'Mrs. A——? Oh yes, such a charming person! Perhaps just a little bit inclined to put on airs, but then—Oh, a very nice little woman. I don't suppose she has ever really been accustomed to much, you know. They say her mother was a dressmaker, but of course one never knows how true these things may be. She does make frantic efforts to get into society here: it is quite amusing. I think the Von Z——s have rather taken her up. She has plenty of money to spend, oh yes. I can't see how her husband can afford to let her live in the style she does abroad, but then that is his affair. She entertains all these people, and of course they go to her house because she can give them some amusement.'—'Mrs. B——? Do I know anything about her? Well, I think I do. Nice? Oh, I do not know that there is anything to be said against her. To be sure, in Paris people did say some rather ugly things. There was a Count L——. And I heard from a very reliable source that she was not on exactly good terms with her husband. So, having daughters, you know, I was obliged to be prudent and rather to shun her than otherwise. Without wishing to be ill-natured I feel inclined to advise you to do the same: I think you will find it quite as well to do so.'—'Mrs. C——? Oh, my dear, such a coarse, common, vulgar creature! She was never received in any sort of good society in New York. Her husband made money one fine day, and she has come abroad and is trying to impose upon people here. She is perfectly ignorant—no education whatever. And the daughters are horribly mauvais genre.'—'Mrs. D——? I should call her an undesirable acquaintance. Not but what she is a very nice sort of person—in her way—but she does make up so frightfully, and she looks so fast. Always has a crowd of officers dangling about her. Her husband is a stick. They do say that when his relatives came abroad last winter they would not call upon him. They were completely incensed at the way in which he permits his wife to carry on.'—'Mrs. E——? Pray, who is Mrs. E——? and where does she get the money to live as she does? I knew her a few years ago, when she had a thousand a year to live on, she and both her children. And now, the toilettes she makes! And, some people say, the debts! And, really, I don't see how it can be otherwise, knowing, as I do, that all the members of her family are as poor as church mice. Her husband committed suicide, you know.—No! did you never hear that? Oh yes: he was mixed up in some rather shady transactions in business, and put an end to himself in that way.'—'Mrs. F——? Oh yes, I remember. An old thing, with a grown-up son, who dresses as if she were fifteen. Dreadfully affected, and so silly! Moreover, Mrs. I—— lived in the same house with her in Dresden—had the apartment above hers—and she told me the servants said that Mrs. F—— was always in some difficulty with tradespeople.'—'Miss G——? Is it possible you have never heard about her? Why, she ran away with a footman, or something of the kind. Was brought back before she had reached the station, I believe; but you can imagine the scandal! All the girls in that family are rather queer, which, considering the stock they come from, is really not very strange,' etc. etc. etc."
In view of these facts, and of many more of the same nature, when one sees the people who come back from Europe after an absence of a year or two unable to speak their own language fluently, because they have heard and spoken nothing but German or French or Italian during that time, and who cannot stand the climate because they are not used to it; when one sees the young ladies who return home unable to take any interest in American life, and who shut themselves away from its society, which to them is most unpolished and vapid, because they have had a European education; when one sees the hundred follies which a glimpse of Europe will put into the heads of people whom before one had had every reason to think sensible enough,—one feels inclined to ask one's self the question, Are we to conclude that European life is demoralizing to Americans? Are we to conclude that the innumerable advantages that such a life confers—the wider view and broader knowledge of things, the softening influences gained by contact with a riper civilization, the æsthetic tastes developed by acquaintance with older and more perfect art—are to count as nothing, are to be outweighed by the disadvantages of the same life?
Certainly, out of a hundred Americans who go abroad ninety-nine return with what they have lost in narrowness of experience completely offset by what they have gained in pretentious affectation. So far from being improved in any way are they that their well-wishers are inclined to think it would have been far better had they never gone at all.
I do not wish to draw the ultimate conclusion from all this that it would be better for Americans were their periodical exodus to Europe to cease. Far from it. That cultivated Americans, and Americans particularly of a more reflective than active mind, should find the relative ease, culture and simplicity of European life more congenial to them than the restless, high-pressure life of America, is quite natural. And if there are no interests or ties to make their presence in their own country imperatively necessary, it is certainly a matter of option with them where they take up their abode. There is no law, human or divine, to bind a person to live in one certain spot when the surroundings are uncongenial to him, and when no private duty fetters him to it, for the simple reason that he has chanced to be born there. Every one is certainly at liberty to seek the centre that best suits him and answers to his needs. Again, there are numbers of persons who with moderate means can live according to their taste in Europe when it would be impossible for them to do so in America on the same amount. There are a thousand small gratifications that people can afford themselves on a small income abroad, a thousand small pleasures in life from which in our country they would be hopelessly debarred; and that they should be debarred from them when escape is possible, and not only possible but most simple and easy, would indeed be hard.
But why cannot Americans indulge this preference for life in Europe, why can they not avail themselves of the choice if it is open to them, and yet remember that they are Americans, and that no circumstance can absolve them from a sacred obligation to show respect for their native country, and to stand as its citizens on their own dignity? Men and women may be conscious of faults and weaknesses in their parents, but they are not expected to expose these weaknesses on that account: instinctive delicacy in any one but a churl would keep him from acknowledging any such failings to his own heart. And a similar feeling should teach us, even if our sympathies were not with our own country, to treat it in word and deed with respect. Until we do learn to show this respect before Europeans we must still resign ourselves to the imputation, if they wish to make it, of crudeness, of being still sadly in want of refining.
Alain Gore.