For the Southern Literary Messenger.
CONVERSATION PARTIES, SOIREES AND SQUEEZES.
MR. WHITE,—If I may be permitted to imitate in my exordium, the happy brevity of the time-saving merchant in auditing his letters, I will begin by expressing the hope, that "my last of —— date has been received and contents duly noted." The excuse for following it up so speedily with another, is not so easily found. Indeed I know of none, unless you will accept as such the old plea—"in for a penny, in for a pound." Even this implies a less risk of censure than I fear my rashness may very possibly bring upon me. Methinks I already hear some of your younger readers demand—"what the deuce has such an old croaker as this impertinent Oliver Oldschool to do with the inroads that we, his juniors and therefore his betters, may choose to make on any or all of those antiquated manners, customs and fashions which seem to be the gods of his idolatry? Age, which stamps their value upon wine and ardent spirits, is precisely that very thing which renders fashion of no value at all. In this, novelty and unexpectedness are our grand, and often our sole desiderata; and for their attainment, we want neither grey headed matrons, nor grey bearded old men to advise us. What they call their experience! (of which they are so fond of boasting,) if listened to at all, serves only to cramp and to trammel our youthful inventions. Therefore, to all such we say:—Ladies and Gentlemen, both hands and tongues off, if you please; laissez nous faire—let us alone."
The bare expectation of any such flouting, you will probably say, should keep me silent, if I was a man of only a moderate degree of prudence. But like many other obstinate people, my inclination to persist seems to augment inversely to my chances of success. Maugre then the danger and forlornness of my undertaking, I must go on. But before I come to the main purpose of the present letter, pray have patience with me, while I offer a few more remarks in anticipation of another still more serious charge, which I expect will be made against me. I must make them too, with the perfect recollection of the maxim, that "he who begins to plead before he is accused, knows himself to be guilty."—True, however, as this may be in general, my case, I hope, will be excepted, after you hear me. The charge to which I allude is,—the odious one of being a Cynic. With you, sir, I am very sure my bare denial would suffice; but you have many readers who know nothing of me. In deference to them therefore, I feel bound to offer some stronger proof of my innocence; if that which is of a negative character (and it is all I can adduce,) will be accepted. Be it known then, to all whom it may concern, that I, Oliver Oldschool, have always denied, and do hereby deny, the truth of the most important, prominent and offensive of all the cynical dogmas, which is,—that "men are nothing but monkeys without tails!" and furthermore, that I hold myself bound and always ready to make battle in this behalf, "pugnis et calcibus, unguibus et rostro:" and all this too, notwithstanding the following most startling and humiliating resemblances which have been traced by the true Cynics between the two species. For instance—"Man" (say they) "is a biped"—so is a monkey; at least so nearly one, that his anterior legs serve him admirably well for arms, and accordingly it is still a mooted point, a much vexed question among naturalists which to call them, arms or legs. Man generally walks erect, although sometimes, when top-heavy, he moves quadruped fashion. The monkey, at least the kind called the ourang outang only reverses the practice, by going more frequently on his two certain and his two quasi legs, than on the two first alone. Man has a facial angle by which those curious, prying fellows, called craniologists, measure the degree of his intelligence and infer the nature of his dispositions. Monkeys also have this angle, often so nearly the same, (mathematically speaking,) with that which we discern in many of our race, that few things are more common than to hear the exclamation "such a one has a monkey face." Lastly, man is most decidedly and conspicuously an imitative animal, so is a monkey, and in a degree so very striking, that there is scarcely an outward movement, action, or gesture of ours which his mimetic talents do not enable him to take off to the life. This is especially true of all those peculiar airs indicative of self-complacency and vanity which mark these two races of animals in contradistinction to all others,1 and may be termed an idiosyncracy of intellect. The coxcomb's ineffable smile of fascination; the witling's pert and sudden smirk of self-conceit; the vain pedant's awkward cachination at his own ill-timed, out-of-place strokes of classic humor; the despicable miser's self-gratulating chuckle at inordinate gain; the great man's gracious grin to his supposed inferiors, and the little man's side-shaking, obstreperous laugh at the abortive joke of some superior from whom he is courting favors; all these and more, your true monkey can enact with such perfect verisimilitude, that if properly dressed for the occasion, he might pass off for the real man in each case, instead of his counterfeit, without the least danger of detection. His mimickry, in addition to its fidelity, has this other remarkable circumstance about it, that in applying it, he seems to have no particular choice of objects, but imitates all external actions alike, whether they be praiseworthy or the reverse. Man, on the contrary, in the exercise of his imitative propensities, shows too often a stronger inclination for the bad than the good—for the faulty than the commendable—for the fantastical and the ridiculous rather than the becoming. In nothing is this more remarkable, than in the greedy, ever restless perseverance with which he seeks foreign fashions and customs, and the reckless pertinacity, under all possible discouragements, with which he strives to imitate and adopt them. Of this assertion I have already endeavored to furnish you with some proofs, which to me at least appeared irrefutable. But I will now attempt to supply a few more. These also shall consist of remarks on certain foreign fashions, which may be said to be still under the process of naturalization, having proved so entirely uncongenial to our principles, habits and opinions, as not yet to be firmly established. They may, therefore, be considered as still within the reach of that exterminating power—public opinion.
1 Goldsmith is the only natural historian, I believe, who has urged the claim of the goose to a participation in this enviable human quality, vanity. In his "Animated Nature" he has the following remark in his natural history of the goose, of which I can give only the substance, not having the volume before me. Speaking of the action commonly called "the strutting of the gander," he says: that in this situation, there is probably no animal on the face of the earth more important in the eyes of another, than a gander in the eyes of a goose!! Verily, I think, (with due submission) he is mistaken; for a fully whiskered, well mustached beau, with all his bristly honors thick upon him, is to a belle, as far above the gander in the estimation of a goose, as imagination can possibly conceive.
At the head of these fashions or customs, pre-eminent above the rest, we find the Conversation Party, the Soiree, and the Squeeze. The first is admitted to be an emigrè from Italy, although the term is here anglicised; the second is from France, and the third from —— nobody knows where, unless from our mother country Great Britain; for Johnson gives both a Saxon and a Welsh etymology to it, both meaning to press or crush between two bodies; which meaning their American derivative (much to its honor,) has most faithfully preserved.
The conversation party would naturally be deemed by one not in the secret, a party particularly formed for the pleasures of conversation; for imparting and receiving agreeable thoughts; for blending amusement with oral instruction; in a word, for such a voluntary and talented reciprocation of ideas as would improve the taste, gratify the feelings, and heighten the mental enjoyment of all the parties concerned. Is it this or any thing that bears the slightest resemblance to it? I ask an answer from any individual who has ever been to one of them, no matter with how much care it might have been selected. To these parties, such as they really are, I have no intention here to object. All I wish or aim at now, is, to have them called by their right names, as every thing ought to be, if we really desire to confine language to its proper use, which is, to make ourselves, at all times, clearly understood. But in styling these things Conversation Parties, before persons who had never been at them, we should practice the grossest deception. For instead of such an assemblage as the current meaning of the term would lead them to expect, and might induce them to seek, they would soon find themselves surrounded by a Babel-like confusion of tongues, where all sorts of odds and ends of unconnected exclamations and eliptical sentences are uttered simultaneously, and in the highest vocal key, by every member of the company—the mules only excepted. Why they should ever frequent such uncongenial spots, is more, I believe, than any one can tell. But certain it is that some of them will always be found there, although as much out of place as the Alumni of the Deaf and Dumb Asylums would be in Congress Hall, attempting to take a debating part in that other Tower of Babel, as John Randolph, with his customary felicity of conception, used to call it.
Of the Soirée, I may truly assert that it is an exotic, still so uncongenial, so illy suited to our people, and even to their organs of speech, that not one in a thousand has learned so much as to pronounce its name correctly. Some, even of those who are so far Frenchified as to have been to France, and consequently to interlard their mother tongue with unintelligible French phrases, by way of authenticating the extent of their travels, call it "Swar-ree;" as if it were a place where all the attendants were to have oaths of some sort or other administered to them, so as to entitle them to be designated Sware-rees. Others again, in a more sportsmanlike manner, pronounce it So-ree, which (as Mr. Jefferson has told us,) is the true Indian appellative for the Rallus, or water-rail. Such orthoepists, we may suppose, if asked where they had been, on returning from a party of the kind, might well answer, in the Virginia sportsman's dialect, "we have been so-russ-in;" for this twistification of the term from its original meaning would be nothing comparable to many that have been made by etymologists of the highest reputation. For instance, all Virginia sportsmen, living near fresh water marshes, know well, that at so-russ-in parties, (as they universally call them,) the great object is to kill and eat fat birds. But a principal object of a soirée party being to catch and use what may well be figuratively called fat birds, the substitution of the term "so-russ-in party" for a "soirée party" is amply justified upon all etymological principles. I therefore take the liberty of strongly recommending it, unless our soirée-giving gentry would suspend their operations long enough, at least to learn from some native French teacher how to invite a French gentleman to their parties, in language that he himself would understand; since to ask him to a swàr-ree or sò-rée would be quite unintelligible.
To gratify the curious I have consulted a friend as to the literal meaning of the French word "soirée," (being no French scholar myself) and find that the term, like thousands of others in all languages, has been pressed from its original signification into its present service, by a sort of metonymy, as the rhetoricians call it; and instead of being applied to designate that portion of the twenty-four hours which we call evening, is now used to express the receiving of short evening visits on any named day, by one's friends and acquaintance. This, according to one of Leontine's letters, published in your February number, seems to be the French fashion. But we Southerners of these United States, either from ignorance or design, have so innovated upon the foreign practice, that it would puzzle a much more experienced man than myself in such matters, to explain what is to be understood, in Virginia parlance, by swar-ree or so-ree, or whatever other barbarous pronunciation they choose to give the French word. I can only say, that I myself have seen a few thus variously called, each of which proved a kind of olla podrida or dish of all sorts; fish, flesh and fowl in one place; a non-descript, desultory kind of dancing in another; all talking-and-no-listening politicians battling in a third; and card playing, drinking and uproarious mirth in a fourth part of the general assemblage, wherein were gathered together, as many as could be, of all sizes and sorts of persons, "ring-streaked, speckled and spotted" to the full, as much as Laban's flocks themselves. Take notice, good Mr. Editor, that I am not now daring to censure, but only to describe, as well as I can, what my own eyes have beheld. I am not now "telling tales out of school;" for my school going days furnished me with no such secrets, however "the march of mind" may have since disclosed them to other tyroes in the pursuit of education.
The Squeeze I shall endeavor more particularly to describe; since my reminiscences, although "few and far between," are still so vivid, that I can venture to delineate them without fear of their suffering, at least from forgetfulness. It is true that I cannot say, as Æneas did to queen Dido, of his sufferings at and after the siege of Troy—"quorum pars magna fui;" as one or two experiments quite sufficed for me; but I can truly apply the same line to myself, could I only substitute the word patiens for "magna," without too much offence against the measure of the poetry, and I could then give in my experience, as the Trojan hero did, in perfect sincerity and good faith.