Something came up in my throat—a quick, unbidden lump of emotion. Was it an echo of old journeys and old seas when life was not safe? What about Columbus and Raleigh and the Norsemen? What about the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and the Greeks? St. Paul writes, “And we being exceedingly tossed with a tempest.” Quite so—fears and pains and terrors. And now this vast ship, eight hundred and eighty-two feet long, eighty-eight feet beam, with huge pits of engines and furnaces and polite, veneered first-cabin decks and passengers! I love life. It is strange, dangerous, beautiful, cruel. I love forms and variations, but I mistrust them utterly. I do not know who I am, or whence I am, or why I am. Only I am here, and would that I were happy and could live so always!
The close of the next day occurred in the lounging-or reception-room, where, after dinner, we all retired to listen to the music, and then began one of those really interesting conversations between G. and Miss X. that sometimes illuminate life and make one see things forever afterward.
It is going to be very hard for me to define just how this could be, for I might say that I had at the moment considerable intellectual contempt for the point of view which the conversation represented. Consider first the American attitude. With us the business of life is not living, but achieving. Roughly speaking, we are willing to go hungry, dirty, to wait in the cold, and to fight gamely, if in the end we can achieve one or more of the seven stars in the human crown of life. Several of the forms of supremacy may seem the same, but they are not. Examine them closely. The average American is not born to place. He does not know what the English sense of order is. We have not that national esprit de corps which characterizes the English and the French, perhaps, certainly the Germans. We are loose, uncouth, but, in our way, wonderful. The spirit of God has once more breathed upon the waters.
Well, the gentleman who was doing the talking in this instance and the lady who was coinciding, inciting, aiding, abetting, approving, and at times leading and demonstrating, represented two different and yet allied points of view. G. is distinctly a product of the English conservative school of thought, a gentleman who wishes sincerely he was not so conservative. His house is in order. You can feel it. His standards and ideals are fixed. He knows what life ought to be, how it ought to be lived. You would never catch him associating with the rag-tag and bobtail of humanity with any keen sense of human brotherhood or emotional tenderness of feeling. One cannot be considering the state of the under dog at any particular time. Government is established to do this sort of thing. The masses! Let them behave. And let us, above all things, have order and peace. This is a section of G. Not all, mind you, but a section. I have described Miss X.
“And oh, the life!” she said at one point. “Americans don’t know how to live. They are all engaged in doing something. They are such beginners. They are only interested in money. I see them in Paris now and then.” She lifted her hand. “Here in Europe people understand life better. They know how to live. They know before they begin how much it will take to do the things that they want to do, and they start out to make that much; not a fortune—just enough to do the things that they want to do. When they get that, they retire and live.”
“And what do they do when they live?” I asked. “What do they call living?”
“Oh, having a nice country house within a short traveling distance of London or Paris; and being able to dine at the best restaurants and visit the best theaters once or twice a week; to go to Paris or Monte Carlo or Scheveningen or Ostend two or three or four, or as many times a year as they please; to wear good clothes; and to be thoroughly comfortable.”
“That is not a bad standard,” I said, and then I added, “And what else do they do?”
“And what else should they do? Isn’t that enough?”
And there you have the European standard according to Miss X. as contrasted with the American standard which is, or has been up to this time, something decidedly different. I am sure. We have not been so eager to live. Our idea has been to work. No American that I have ever known has had the idea of laying up just so much, a moderate amount, and then retiring and living. He has had quite another thought in his mind. The American, the average American, I am sure loves power, the ability to do something, far more earnestly than he loves mere living. He wants to be an officer or a director of something, a poet, anything you please for the sake of being it, not for the sake of living.