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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of As We Go by Charles Dudley Warner
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+Title: As We Go
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+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
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+
+As We Go
+
+by Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS: (28 short studies)
+
+OUR PRESIDENT
+THE NEWSPAPER-MADE MAN
+INTERESTING GIRLS
+GIVE THE MEN A CHANCE
+THE ADVENT OF CANDOR
+THE AMERICAN MAN
+THE ELECTRIC WAY
+CAN A HUSBAND OPEN HIS WIFE'S LETTERS?
+A LEISURE CLASS
+WEATHER AND CHARACTER
+BORN WITH AN "EGO"
+JUVENTUS MUNDI
+A BEAUTIFUL OLD AGE
+THE ATTRACTION OF THE REPULSIVE
+GIVING AS A LUXURY
+CLIMATE AND HAPPINESS
+THE NEW FEMININE RESERVE
+REPOSE IN ACTIVITY
+WOMEN--IDEAL AND REAL
+THE ART OF IDLENESS
+IS THERE ANY CONVERSATION
+THE TALL GIRL
+THE DEADLY DIARY
+THE WHISTLING GIRL
+BORN OLD AND RICH
+THE "OLD SOLDIER"
+THE ISLAND OF BIMINI
+JUNE
+
+
+
+
+OUR PRESIDENT
+
+We are so much accustomed to kings and queens and other privileged
+persons of that sort in this world that it is only on reflection that we
+wonder how they became so.  The mystery is not their continuance, but how
+did they get a start?  We take little help from studying the bees--
+originally no one could have been born a queen.  There must have been not
+only a selection, but an election, not by ballot, but by consent some way
+expressed, and the privileged persons got their positions because they
+were the strongest, or the wisest, or the most cunning.  But the
+descendants of these privileged persons hold the same positions when they
+are neither strong, nor wise, nor very cunning. This also is a mystery.
+The persistence of privilege is an unexplained thing in human affairs,
+and the consent of mankind to be led in government and in fashion by
+those to whom none of the original conditions of leadership attach is a
+philosophical anomaly.  How many of the living occupants of thrones,
+dukedoms, earldoms, and such high places are in position on their own
+merits, or would be put there by common consent?  Referring their origin
+to some sort of an election, their continuance seems to rest simply on
+forbearance.  Here in America we are trying a new experiment; we have
+adopted the principle of election, but we have supplemented it with the
+equally authoritative right of deposition.  And it is interesting to see
+how it has worked for a hundred years, for it is human nature to like to
+be set up, but not to like to be set down.  If in our elections we do not
+always get the best--perhaps few elections ever did--we at least do not
+perpetuate forever in privilege our mistakes or our good hits.
+
+The celebration in New York, in 1889, of the inauguration of Washington
+was an instructive spectacle.  How much of privilege had been gathered
+and perpetuated in a century?  Was it not an occasion that emphasized our
+republican democracy?  Two things were conspicuous.  One was that we did
+not honor a family, or a dynasty, or a title, but a character; and the
+other was that we did not exalt any living man, but simply the office of
+President.  It was a demonstration of the power of the people to create
+their own royalty, and then to put it aside when they have done with it.
+It was difficult to see how greater honors could have been paid to any
+man than were given to the President when he embarked at Elizabethport
+and advanced, through a harbor crowded with decorated vessels, to the
+great city, the wharves and roofs of which were black with human beings
+--a holiday city which shook with the tumult of the popular welcome.
+Wherever he went he drew the swarms in the streets as the moon draws the
+tide.  Republican simplicity need not fear comparison with any royal
+pageant when the President was received at the Metropolitan, and, in a
+scene of beauty and opulence that might be the flowering of a thousand
+years instead of a century, stood upon the steps of the "dais" to greet
+the devoted Centennial Quadrille, which passed before him with the
+courageous five, 'Imperator, morituri te salutamus'.  We had done it--we,
+the people; that was our royalty.  Nobody had imposed it on us.  It was
+not even selected out of four hundred.  We had taken one of the common
+people and set him up there, creating for the moment also a sort of royal
+family and a court for a background, in a splendor just as imposing for
+the passing hour as an imperial spectacle.  We like to show that we can
+do it, and we like to show also that we can undo it.  For at the banquet,
+where the Elected ate his dinner, not only in the presence of, but with,
+representatives of all the people of all the States, looked down on by
+the acknowledged higher power in American life, there sat also with him
+two men who had lately been in his great position, the centre only a
+little while ago, as he was at the moment, of every eye in the republic,
+now only common citizens without a title, without any insignia of rank,
+able to transmit to posterity no family privilege.  If our hearts swelled
+with pride that we could create something just as good as royalty, that
+the republic had as many men of distinguished appearance, as much beauty,
+and as much brilliance of display as any traditional government, we also
+felicitated ourselves that we could sweep it all away by a vote and
+reproduce it with new actors next day.
+
+It must be confessed that it was a people's affair.  If at any time there
+was any idea that it could be controlled only by those who represented
+names honored for a hundred years, or conspicuous by any social
+privilege, the idea was swamped in popular feeling.  The names that had
+been elected a hundred years ago did not stay elected unless the present
+owners were able to distinguish themselves.  There is nothing so to be
+coveted in a country as the perpetuity of honorable names, and the
+"centennial" showed that we are rich in those that have been honorably
+borne, but it also showed that the century has gathered no privilege that
+can count upon permanence.
+
+But there is another aspect of the situation that is quite as serious and
+satisfactory.  Now that the ladies of the present are coming to dress as
+ladies dressed a hundred years ago, we can make an adequate comparison of
+beauty.  Heaven forbid that we should disparage the women of the
+Revolutionary period!  They looked as well as they could under all the
+circumstances of a new country and the hardships of an early settlement.
+Some of them looked exceedingly well--there were beauties in those days
+as there were giants in Old Testament times.  The portraits that have
+come down to us of some of them excite our admiration, and indeed we have
+a sort of tradition of the loveliness of the women of that remote period.
+The gallant men of the time exalted them.  Yet it must be admitted by any
+one who witnessed the public and private gatherings of April, 1889, in
+New York, contributed to as they were by women from every State, and who
+is unprejudiced by family associations, that the women of America seem
+vastly improved in personal appearance since the days when George
+Washington was a lover: that is to say, the number of beautiful women is
+greater in proportion to the population, and their beauty and charm are
+not inferior to those which have been so much extolled in the
+Revolutionary time.  There is no doubt that if George Washington could
+have been at the Metropolitan ball he would have acknowledged this, and
+that while he might have had misgivings about some of our political
+methods, he would have been more proud than ever to be still acknowledged
+the Father of his Country.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE NEWSPAPER-MADE MAN
+
+A fair correspondent--has the phrase an old-time sound?--thinks we should
+pay more attention to men.  In a revolutionary time, when great questions
+are in issue, minor matters, which may nevertheless be very important,
+are apt to escape the consideration they deserve.  We share our
+correspondent's interest in men, but must plead the pressure of
+circumstances.  When there are so many Woman's Journals devoted to the
+wants and aspirations of women alone, it is perhaps time to think of
+having a Man's journal, which should try to keep his head above-water in
+the struggle for social supremacy.  When almost every number of the
+leading periodicals has a paper about Woman--written probably by a woman
+--Woman Today, Woman Yesterday, Woman Tomorrow; when the inquiry is daily
+made in the press as to what is expected of woman, and the new
+requirements laid upon her by reason of her opportunities, her entrance
+into various occupations, her education--the impartial observer is likely
+to be confused, if he is not swept away by the rising tide of femininity
+in modern life.
+
+But this very superiority of interest in the future of women is a warning
+to man to look about him, and see where in this tide he is going to land,
+if he will float or go ashore, and what will be his character and his
+position in the new social order.  It will not do for him to sit on the
+stump of one of his prerogatives that woman has felled, and say with
+Brahma, "They reckon ill who leave me out," for in the day of the
+Subjection of Man it may be little consolation that he is left in.
+
+It must be confessed that man has had a long inning.  Perhaps it is true
+that he owed this to his physical strength, and that he will only keep it
+hereafter by intellectual superiority, by the dominance of mind.  And how
+in this generation is he equipping himself for the future?  He is the
+money-making animal.  That is beyond dispute.  Never before were there
+such business men as this generation can show--Napoleons of finance,
+Alexanders of adventure, Shakespeares of speculation, Porsons of
+accumulation.  He is great in his field, but is he leaving the
+intellectual province to woman?  Does he read as much as she does?  Is he
+becoming anything but a newspaper-made person?  Is his mind getting to be
+like the newspaper?  Speaking generally of the mass of business men--and
+the mass are business men in this country--have they any habit of reading
+books?  They have clubs, to be sure, but of what sort?  With the
+exception of a conversation club here and there, and a literary club,
+more or less perfunctory, are they not mostly social clubs for comfort
+and idle lounging, many of them known, as other workmen are, by their
+"chips"?  What sort of a book would a member make out of "Chips from my
+Workshop"?  Do the young men, to any extent, join in Browning clubs and
+Shakespeare clubs and Dante clubs?  Do they meet for the study of
+history, of authors, of literary periods, for reading, and discussing
+what they read?  Do they in concert dig in the encyclopaedias, and write
+papers about the correlation of forces, and about Savonarola, and about
+the Three Kings?  In fact, what sort of a hand would the Three Kings
+suggest to them?  In the large cities the women's clubs, pursuing
+literature, art, languages, botany, history, geography, geology,
+mythology, are innumerable.  And there is hardly a village in the land
+that has not from one to six clubs of young girls who meet once a week
+for some intellectual purpose.  What are the young men of the villages
+and the cities doing meantime?  How are they preparing to meet socially
+these young ladies who are cultivating their minds?  Are they adapting
+themselves to the new conditions?  Or are they counting, as they always
+have done, on the adaptability of women, on the facility with which the
+members of the bright sex can interest themselves in base-ball and the
+speed of horses and the chances of the "street"?  Is it comfortable for
+the young man, when the talk is about the last notable book, or the
+philosophy of the popular poet or novelist, to feel that laughing eyes
+are sounding his ignorance?
+
+Man is a noble creation, and he has fine and sturdy qualities which
+command the admiration of the other sex, but how will it be when that
+sex, by reason of superior acquirements, is able to look down on him
+intellectually?  It used to be said that women are what men wish to have
+them, that they endeavored to be the kind of women who would win
+masculine admiration.  How will it be if women have determined to make
+themselves what it pleases them to be, and to cultivate their powers in
+the expectation of pleasing men, if they indulge any such expectation, by
+their higher qualities only?  This is not a fanciful possibility.  It is
+one that young men will do well to ponder.  It is easy to ridicule the
+literary and economic and historical societies, and the naive courage
+with which young women in them attack the gravest problems, and to say
+that they are only a passing fashion, like decorative art and a mode of
+dress.  But a fashion is not to be underestimated; and when a fashion
+continues and spreads like this one, it is significant of a great change
+going on in society.  And it is to be noticed that this fashion is
+accompanied by other phenomena as interesting.  There is scarcely an
+occupation, once confined almost exclusively to men, in which women are
+not now conspicuous.  Never before were there so many women who are
+superior musicians, performers themselves and organizers of musical
+societies; never before so many women who can draw well; never so many
+who are successful in literature, who write stories, translate, compile,
+and are acceptable workers in magazines and in publishing houses; and
+never before were so many women reading good books, and thinking about
+them, and talking about them, and trying to apply the lessons in them to
+the problems of their own lives, which are seen not to end with marriage.
+A great deal of this activity, crude much of it, is on the intellectual
+side, and must tell strongly by-and-by in the position of women.  And the
+young men will take notice that it is the intellectual force that must
+dominate in life.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+INTERESTING GIRLS
+
+It seems hardly worth while to say that this would be a more interesting
+country if there were more interesting people in it.  But the remark is
+worth consideration in a land where things are so much estimated by what
+they cost.  It is a very expensive country, especially so in the matter
+of education, and one cannot but reflect whether the result is in
+proportion to the outlay.  It costs a great many thousands of dollars and
+over four years of time to produce a really good base-ball player, and
+the time and money invested in the production of a society young woman
+are not less.  No complaint is made of the cost of these schools of the
+higher education; the point is whether they produce interesting people.
+Of course all women are interesting.  It has got pretty well noised about
+the world that American women are, on the whole, more interesting than
+any others.  This statement is not made boastfully, but simply as a
+market quotation, as one might say.  They are sought for; they rule high.
+They have a "way"; they know how to be fascinating, to be agreeable; they
+unite freedom of manner with modesty of behavior; they are apt to have
+beauty, and if they have not, they know how to make others think they
+have.  Probably the Greek girls in their highest development under
+Phidias were never so attractive as the American girls of this period;
+and if we had a Phidias who could put their charms in marble, all the
+antique galleries would close up and go out of business.
+
+But it must be understood that in regard to them, as to the dictionaries,
+it is necessary to "get the best."  Not all women are equally
+interesting, and some of those on whom most educational money is lavished
+are the least so.  It can be said broadly that everybody is interesting
+up to a certain point.  There is no human being from whom the inquiring
+mind cannot learn something.  It is so with women.  Some are interesting
+for five minutes, some for ten, some for an hour; some are not exhausted
+in a whole day; and some (and this shows the signal leniency of
+Providence) are perennially entertaining, even in the presence of
+masculine stupidity.  Of course the radical trouble of this world is that
+there are not more people who are interesting comrades, day in and day
+out, for a lifetime.  It is greatly to the credit of American women that
+so many of them have this quality, and have developed it, unprotected, in
+free competition with all countries which have been pouring in women
+without the least duty laid upon their grace or beauty.  We, have a
+tariff upon knowledge--we try to shut out all of that by a duty on books;
+we have a tariff on piety and intelligence in a duty on clergymen; we try
+to exclude art by a levy on it; but we have never excluded the raw
+material of beauty, and the result is that we can successfully compete in
+the markets of the world.
+
+This, however, is a digression.  The reader wants to know what this
+quality of being interesting has to do with girls' schools.  It is
+admitted that if one goes into a new place he estimates the agreeableness
+of it according to the number of people it contains with whom it is a
+pleasure to converse, who have either the ability to talk well or the
+intelligence to listen appreciatingly even if deceivingly, whose society
+has the beguiling charm that makes even natural scenery satisfactory.  It
+is admitted also that in our day the burden of this end of life, making
+it agreeable, is mainly thrown upon women.  Men make their business an
+excuse for not being entertaining, or the few who cultivate the mind
+(aside from the politicians, who always try to be winning) scarcely think
+it worth while to contribute anything to make society bright and
+engaging.  Now if the girls' schools and colleges, technical and other,
+merely add to the number of people who have practical training and
+knowledge without personal charm, what becomes of social life?  We are
+impressed with the excellence of the schools and colleges for women--
+impressed also with the co-educating institutions.  There is no sight
+more inspiring than an assemblage of four or five hundred young women
+attacking literature, science, and all the arts.  The grace and courage
+of the attack alone are worth all it costs.  All the arts and science and
+literature are benefited, but one of the chief purposes that should be in
+view is unattained if the young women are not made more interesting, both
+to themselves and to others.  Ability to earn an independent living may
+be conceded to be important, health is indispensable, and beauty of face
+and form are desirable; knowledge is priceless, and unselfish amiability
+is above the price of rubies; but how shall we set a value, so far as the
+pleasure of living is concerned, upon the power to be interesting?  We
+hear a good deal about the highly educated young woman with reverence,
+about the emancipated young woman with fear and trembling, but what can
+take the place of the interesting woman?  Anxiety is this moment
+agitating the minds of tens of thousands of mothers about the education
+of their daughters.  Suppose their education should be directed to the
+purpose of making them interesting women, what a fascinating country this
+would be about the year 1900.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GIVE THE MEN A CHANCE
+
+Give the men a chance.  Upon the young women of America lies a great
+responsibility.  The next generation will be pretty much what they choose
+to make it; and what are they doing for the elevation of young men?  It
+is true that there are the colleges for men, which still perform a good
+work--though some of them run a good deal more to a top-dressing of
+accomplishments than to a sub-soiling of discipline--but these colleges
+reach comparatively few.  There remain the great mass who are devoted to
+business and pleasure, and only get such intellectual cultivation as
+society gives them or they chance to pick up in current publications.
+The young women are the leisure class, consequently--so we hear--the
+cultivated class.  Taking a certain large proportion of our society, the
+women in it toil not, neither do they spin; they do little or no domestic
+work; they engage in no productive occupation.  They are set apart for a
+high and ennobling service--the cultivation of the mind and the rescue of
+society from materialism.  They are the influence that keeps life
+elevated and sweet--are they not?  For what other purpose are they set
+apart in elegant leisure?  And nobly do they climb up to the duties of
+their position.  They associate together in esoteric, intellectual
+societies.  Every one is a part of many clubs, the object of which is
+knowledge and the broadening of the intellectual horizon.  Science,
+languages, literature, are their daily food.  They can speak in tongues;
+they can talk about the solar spectrum; they can interpret Chaucer,
+criticise Shakespeare, understand Browning.  There is no literature,
+ancient or modern, that they do not dig up by the roots and turn over, no
+history that they do not drag before the club for final judgment.  In
+every little village there is this intellectual stir and excitement; why,
+even in New York, readings interfere with the german; --['Dances', likely
+referring to the productions of the Straus family in Vienna.  D.W.]--and
+Boston!  Boston is no longer divided into wards, but into Browning
+"sections."
+
+All this is mainly the work of women.  The men are sometimes admitted,
+are even hired to perform and be encouraged and criticised; that is, men
+who are already highly cultivated, or who are in sympathy with the noble
+feminization of the age.  It is a glorious movement.  Its professed
+object is to give an intellectual lift to society.  And no doubt, unless
+all reports are exaggerated, it is making our great leisure class of
+women highly intellectual beings.  But, encouraging as this prospect is,
+it gives us pause.  Who are these young women to associate with? with
+whom are they to hold high converse?  For life is a two-fold affair.  And
+meantime what is being done for the young men who are expected to share
+in the high society of the future?  Will not the young women by-and-by
+find themselves in a lonesome place, cultivated away beyond their natural
+comrades?  Where will they spend their evenings?  This sobering thought
+suggests a duty that the young women are neglecting.  We refer to the
+education of the young men.  It is all very well for them to form clubs
+for their own advancement, and they ought not to incur the charge of
+selfishness in so doing; but how much better would they fulfill their
+mission if they would form special societies for the cultivation of young
+men!--sort of intellectual mission bands.  Bring them into the literary
+circle.  Make it attractive for them.  Women with their attractions, not
+to speak of their wiles, can do anything they set out to do.  They can
+elevate the entire present generation of young men, if they give their
+minds to it, to care for the intellectual pursuits they care for.  Give
+the men a chance, and----
+
+Musing along in this way we are suddenly pulled up by the reflection that
+it is impossible to make an unqualified statement that is wholly true
+about anything.  What chance have I, anyway? inquires the young man who
+thinks sometimes and occasionally wants to read.  What sort of leading-
+strings are these that I am getting into?  Look at the drift of things.
+Is the feminization of the world a desirable thing for a vigorous future?
+Are the women, or are they not, taking all the virility out of
+literature?  Answer me that.  All the novels are written by, for, or
+about women--brought to their standard.  Even Henry James, who studies
+the sex untiringly, speaks about the "feminization of literature."  They
+write most of the newspaper correspondence--and write it for women.  They
+are even trying to feminize the colleges.  Granted that woman is the
+superior being; all the more, what chance is there for man if this sort
+of thing goes on?  Are you going to make a race of men on feminine
+fodder?  And here is the still more perplexing part of it.  Unless all
+analysis of the female heart is a delusion, and all history false, what
+women like most of all things in this world is a Man, virile, forceful,
+compelling, a solid rock of dependence, a substantial unfeminine being,
+whom it is some satisfaction and glory and interest to govern and rule in
+the right way, and twist round the feminine finger.  If women should
+succeed in reducing or raising--of course raising--men to the feminine
+standard, by feminizing society, literature, the colleges, and all that,
+would they not turn on their creations--for even the Bible intimates that
+women are uncertain and go in search of a Man?  It is this sort of blind
+instinct of the young man for preserving himself in the world that makes
+him so inaccessible to the good he might get from the prevailing culture
+of the leisure class.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ADVENT OF CANDOR
+
+Those who are anxious about the fate of Christmas, whether it is not
+becoming too worldly and too expensive a holiday to be indulged in except
+by the very poor, mark with pleasure any indications that the true spirit
+of the day--brotherhood and self-abnegation and charity--is infusing
+itself into modern society.  The sentimental Christmas of thirty years
+ago could not last; in time the manufactured jollity got to be more
+tedious and a greater strain on the feelings than any misfortune
+happening to one's neighbor.  Even for a day it was very difficult to
+buzz about in the cheery manner prescribed, and the reaction put human
+nature in a bad light.  Nor was it much better when gradually the day
+became one of Great Expectations, and the sweet spirit of it was quenched
+in worry or soured in disappointment.  It began to take on the aspect of
+a great lottery, in which one class expected to draw in reverse
+proportion to what it put in, and another class knew that it would only
+reap as it had sowed.  The day, blessed in its origin, and meaningless if
+there is a grain of selfishness in it, was thus likely to become a sort
+of Clearing-house of all obligations and assume a commercial aspect that
+took the heart out of it--like the enormous receptions for paying social
+debts which take the place of the old-fashioned hospitality.  Everybody
+knew, meantime, that the spirit of good-will, the grace of universal
+sympathy, was really growing in the world, and that it was only our
+awkwardness that, by striving to cram it all for a year into twenty-four
+hours, made it seem a little farcical.  And everybody knows that when
+goodness becomes fashionable, goodness is likely to suffer a little.  A
+virtue overdone falls on t'other side.  And a holiday that takes on such
+proportions that the Express companies and the Post-office cannot handle
+it is in danger of a collapse.  In consideration of these things, and
+because, as has been pointed out year after year, Christmas is becoming a
+burden, the load of which is looked forward to with apprehension--and
+back on with nervous prostration--fear has been expressed that the
+dearest of all holidays in Christian lands would have to go again under a
+sort of Puritan protest, or into a retreat for rest and purification.
+We are enabled to announce for the encouragement of the single-minded in
+this best of all days, at the close of a year which it is best not to
+characterize, that those who stand upon the social watch-towers in Europe
+and America begin to see a light--or, it would be better to say, to
+perceive a spirit--in society which is likely to change many things, and;
+among others, to work a return of Christian simplicity.  As might be
+expected in these days, the spirit is exhibited in the sex which is first
+at the wedding and last in the hospital ward.  And as might have been
+expected, also, this spirit is shown by the young woman of the period, in
+whose hands are the issues of the future.  If she preserve her present
+mind long enough, Christmas will become a day that will satisfy every
+human being, for the purpose of the young woman will pervade it.  The
+tendency of the young woman generally to simplicity, of the American
+young woman to a certain restraint (at least when abroad), to a deference
+to her elders, and to tradition, has been noted.  The present phenomenon
+is quite beyond this, and more radical.  It is, one may venture to say,
+an attempt to conform the inner being to the outward simplicity.  If one
+could suspect the young woman of taking up any line not original, it
+might be guessed that the present fashion (which is bewildering the most
+worldly men with a new and irresistible fascination) was set by the self-
+revelations of Marie Bashkirtseff.  Very likely, however, it was a new
+spirit in the world, of which Marie was the first publishing example.
+Its note is self-analysis, searching, unsparing, leaving no room for the
+deception of self or of the world.  Its leading feature is extreme
+candor.  It is not enough to tell the truth (that has been told before);
+but one must act and tell the whole truth.  One does not put on the shirt
+front and the standing collar and the knotted cravat of the other sex as
+a mere form; it is an act of consecration, of rigid, simple come-out-ness
+into the light of truth.  This noble candor will suffer no concealments.
+She would not have her lover even, still more the general world of men,
+think she is better, or rather other, than she is.  Not that she would
+like to appear a man among men, far from that; but she wishes to talk
+with candor and be talked to candidly, without taking advantage of that
+false shelter of sex behind which women have been accused of dodging.  If
+she is nothing else, she is sincere, one might say wantonly sincere.  And
+this lucid, candid inner life is reflected in her dress.  This is not
+only simple in its form, in its lines; it is severe.  To go into the shop
+of a European modiste is almost to put one's self into a truthful and
+candid frame of mind.  Those leave frivolous ideas behind who enter here.
+The 'modiste' will tell the philosopher that it is now the fashion to be
+severe; in a word, it is 'fesch'.  Nothing can go beyond that.  And it
+symbolizes the whole life, its self-examination, earnestness, utmost
+candor in speech and conduct.
+
+The statesman who is busy about his tariff and his reciprocity, and his
+endeavor to raise money like potatoes, may little heed and much
+undervalue this advent of candor into the world as a social force.  But
+the philosopher will make no such mistake.  He knows that they who build
+without woman build in vain, and that she is the great regenerator, as
+she is the great destroyer.  He knows too much to disregard the gravity
+of any fashionable movement.  He knows that there is no power on earth
+that can prevent the return of the long skirt.  And that if the young
+woman has decided to be severe and candid and frank with herself and in
+her intercourse with others, we must submit and thank God.
+
+And what a gift to the world is this for the Christmas season!  The
+clear-eyed young woman of the future, always dear and often an anxiety,
+will this year be an object of enthusiasm.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE AMERICAN MAN
+
+The American man only develops himself and spreads himself and grows "for
+all he is worth" in the Great West.  He is more free and limber there,
+and unfolds those generous peculiarities and largenesses of humanity
+which never blossomed before.  The "environment" has much to do with it.
+The great spaces over which he roams contribute to the enlargement of his
+mental horizon.  There have been races before who roamed the illimitable
+desert, but they traveled on foot or on camelback, and were limited in
+their range.  There was nothing continental about them, as there is about
+our railway desert travelers, who swing along through thousands of miles
+of sand and sage-bush with a growing contempt for time and space.  But
+expansive and great as these people have become under the new conditions,
+we have a fancy that the development of the race has only just begun, and
+that the future will show us in perfection a kind of man new to the
+world.  Out somewhere on the Santa Fe route, where the desert of one day
+was like the desert of the day before, and the Pullman car rolls and
+swings over the wide waste beneath the blue sky day after day, under its
+black flag of smoke, in the early gray of morning, when the men were
+waiting their turns at the ablution bowls, a slip of a boy, perhaps aged
+seven, stood balancing himself on his little legs, clad in knicker-
+bockers, biding his time, with all the nonchalance of an old campaigner.
+"How did you sleep, cap?" asked a well-meaning elderly gentleman."  Well,
+thank you," was the dignified response; "as I always do on a sleeping-
+car."  Always does?  Great horrors!  Hardly out of his swaddling-clothes,
+and yet he always sleeps well in a sleeper!  Was he born on the wheels?
+was he cradled in a Pullman?  He has always been in motion, probably; he
+was started at thirty miles an hour, no doubt, this marvelous boy of our
+new era.  He was not born in a house at rest, but the locomotive snatched
+him along with a shriek and a roar before his eyes were fairly open, and
+he was rocked in a "section," and his first sensation of life was that of
+moving rapidly over vast arid spaces, through cattle ranges and along
+canons.  The effect of quick and easy locomotion on character may have
+been noted before, but it seems that here is the production of a new sort
+of man, the direct product of our railway era.  It is not simply that
+this boy is mature, but he must be a different and a nobler sort of boy
+than one born, say, at home or on a canal-boat; for, whether he was born
+on the rail or not, he belongs to the railway system of civilization.
+Before he gets into trousers he is old in experience, and he has
+discounted many of the novelties that usually break gradually on the
+pilgrim in this world.  He belongs to the new expansive race that must
+live in motion, whose proper home is the Pullman (which will probably be
+improved in time into a dustless, sweet-smelling, well-aired bedroom),
+and whose domestic life will be on the wing, so to speak.  The Inter-
+State Commerce Bill will pass him along without friction from end to end
+of the Union, and perhaps a uniform divorce law will enable him to change
+his marital relations at any place where he happens to dine.  This
+promising lad is only a faint intimation of what we are all coming to
+when we fully acquire the freedom of the continent, and come into that
+expansiveness of feeling and of language which characterizes the Great
+West.  It is a burst of joyous exuberance that comes from the sense of an
+illimitable horizon.  It shows itself in the tender words of a local
+newspaper at Bowie, Arizona, on the death of a beloved citizen: "'Death
+loves a shining mark,' and she hit a dandy when she turned loose on Jim."
+And also in the closing words of a New Mexico obituary, which the Kansas
+Magazine quotes: "Her tired spirit was released from the pain-racking
+body and soared aloft to eternal glory at 4.30 Denver time."  We die, as
+it were, in motion, as we sleep, and there is nowhere any boundary to our
+expansion.  Perhaps we shall never again know any rest as we now
+understand the term--rest being only change of motion--and we shall not
+be able to sleep except on the cars, and whether we die by Denver time or
+by the 90th meridian, we shall only change our time.  Blessed be this
+slip of a boy who is a man before he is an infant, and teaches us what
+rapid transit can do for our race!  The only thing that can possibly
+hinder us in our progress will be second childhood; we have abolished
+first.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ELECTRIC WAY
+
+We are quite in the electric way.  We boast that we have made electricity
+our slave, but the slave whom we do not understand is our master.  And
+before we know him we shall be transformed.  Mr. Edison proposes to send
+us over the country at the rate of one hundred miles an hour.  This
+pleases us, because we fancy we shall save time, and because we are
+taught that the chief object in life is to "get there" quickly.  We
+really have an idea that it is a gain to annihilate distance, forgetting
+that as a matter of personal experience we are already too near most
+people.  But this speed by rail will enable us to live in Philadelphia
+and do business in New York.  It will make the city of Chicago two
+hundred miles square.  And the bigger Chicago is, the more important this
+world becomes.  This pleasing anticipation--that of traveling by
+lightning, and all being huddled together--is nothing to the promised
+universal illumination by a diffused light that shall make midnight as
+bright as noonday.  We shall then save all the time there is, and at the
+age of thirty-five have lived the allotted seventy years, and long, if
+not for 'Gotterdammerung', at least for some world where, by touching a
+button, we can discharge our limbs of electricity and take a little
+repose.  The most restless and ambitious of us can hardly conceive of
+Chicago as a desirable future state of existence.
+
+This, however, is only the external or superficial view of the subject;
+at the best it is only symbolical.  Mr. Edison is wasting his time in
+objective experiments, while we are in the deepest ignorance as to our
+electric personality or our personal electricity.  We begin to apprehend
+that we are electric beings, that these outward manifestations of a
+subtile form are only hints of our internal state.  Mr. Edison should
+turn his attention from physics to humanity electrically considered in
+its social condition.  We have heard a great deal about affinities.  We
+are told that one person is positive and another negative, and that
+representing socially opposite poles they should come together and make
+an electric harmony, that two positives or two negatives repel each
+other, and if conventionally united end in divorce, and so on.  We read
+that such a man is magnetic, meaning that he can poll a great many votes;
+or that such a woman thrilled her audience, meaning probably that they
+were in an electric condition to be shocked by her.  Now this is what we
+want to find out--to know if persons are really magnetic or sympathetic,
+and how to tell whether a person is positive or negative.  In politics we
+are quite at sea.  What is the good of sending a man to Washington at the
+rate of a hundred miles an hour if we are uncertain of his electric
+state?  The ideal House of Representatives ought to be pretty nearly
+balanced--half positive, half negative.  Some Congresses seem to be made
+up pretty much of negatives.  The time for the electrician to test the
+candidate is before he is put in nomination, not dump him into Congress
+as we do now, utterly ignorant of whether his currents run from his heels
+to his head or from his head to his heels, uncertain, indeed, as to
+whether he has magnetism to run in at all.  Nothing could be more
+unscientific than the process and the result.
+
+In social life it is infinitely worse.  You, an electric unmarried man,
+enter a room full of attractive women.  How are you to know who is
+positive and who is negative, or who is a maiden lady in equilibrium, if
+it be true, as scientists affirm, that the genus old maid is one in whom
+the positive currents neutralize the negative currents?  Your affinity is
+perhaps the plainest woman in the room.  But beauty is a juggling sprite,
+entirely uncontrolled by electricity, and you are quite likely to make a
+mistake.  It is absurd the way we blunder on in a scientific age.  We
+touch a button, and are married.  The judge touches another button, and
+we are divorced.  If when we touched the first button it revealed us both
+negatives, we should start back in horror, for it is only before
+engagement that two negatives make an affirmative.  That is the reason
+that some clergymen refuse to marry a divorced woman; they see that she
+has made one electric mistake, and fear she will make another.  It is all
+very well for the officiating clergyman to ask the two intending to
+commit matrimony if they have a license from the town clerk, if they are
+of age or have the consent of parents, and have a million; but the vital
+point is omitted.  Are they electric affinities?  It should be the duty
+of the town-clerk, by a battery, or by some means to be discovered by
+electricians, to find out the galvanic habit of the parties, their
+prevailing electric condition.  Temporarily they may seem to be in
+harmony, and may deceive themselves into the belief that they are at
+opposite poles equidistant from the equator, and certain to meet on that
+imaginary line in matrimonial bliss.  Dreadful will be the awakening to
+an insipid life, if they find they both have the same sort of currents.
+It is said that women change their minds and their dispositions, that men
+are fickle, and that both give way after marriage to natural inclinations
+that were suppressed while they were on the good behavior that the
+supposed necessity of getting married imposes.  This is so notoriously
+true that it ought to create a public panic.  But there is hope in the
+new light.  If we understand it, persons are born in a certain electrical
+condition, and substantially continue in it, however much they may
+apparently wobble about under the influence of infirm minds and acquired
+wickedness.  There are, of course, variations of the compass to be
+reckoned with, and the magnet may occasionally be bewitched by near and
+powerful attracting objects.  But, on the whole, the magnet remains the
+same, and it is probable that a person's normal electric condition is the
+thing in him least liable to dangerous variation.  If this be true, the
+best basis for matrimony is the electric, and our social life would have
+fewer disappointments if men and women went about labeled with their
+scientifically ascertained electric qualities.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CAN A HUSBAND OPEN HIS WIFE'S LETTERS?
+
+Can a husband open his wife's letters?  That would depend, many would
+say, upon what kind of a husband he is.  But it cannot be put aside in
+that flippant manner, for it is a legal right that is in question, and it
+has recently been decided in a Paris tribunal that the husband has the,
+right to open the letters addressed to his wife.  Of course in America an
+appeal would instantly be taken from this decision, and perhaps by
+husbands themselves; for in this world rights are becoming so impartially
+distributed that this privilege granted to the husband might at once be
+extended to the wife, and she would read all his business correspondence,
+and his business is sometimes various and complicated.  The Paris
+decision must be based upon the familiar formula that man and wife are
+one, and that that one is the husband.  If a man has the right to read
+all the letters written to his wife, being his property by reason of his
+ownership of her, why may he not have a legal right to know all that is
+said to her?  The question is not whether a wife ought to receive letters
+that her husband may not read, or listen to talk that he may not hear,
+but whether he has a sort of lordship that gives him privileges which she
+does not enjoy.  In our modern notion of marriage, which is getting
+itself expressed in statute law, marriage is supposed to rest on mutual
+trust and mutual rights.  In theory the husband and wife are still one,
+and there can nothing come into the life of one that is not shared by the
+other; in fact, if the marriage is perfect and the trust absolute, the
+personality of each is respected by the other, and each is freely the
+judge of what shall be contributed to the common confidence; and if there
+are any concealments, it is well believed that they are for the mutual
+good.  If every one were as perfect in the marriage relation as those who
+are reading these lines, the question of the wife's letters would never
+arise.  The man, trusting his wife, would not care to pry into any little
+secrets his wife might have, or bother himself about her correspondence;
+he would know, indeed, that if he had lost her real affection, a
+surveillance of her letters could not restore it.
+
+Perhaps it is a modern notion that marriage is a union of trust and not
+of suspicion, of expectation of faithfulness the more there is freedom.
+At any rate, the tendency, notwithstanding the French decision, is away
+from the common-law suspicion and tyranny towards a higher trust in an
+enlarged freedom.  And it is certain that the rights cannot all be on one
+side and the duties on the other.  If the husband legally may compel his
+wife to show him her letters, the courts will before long grant the same
+privilege to the wife.  But, without pressing this point, we hold
+strongly to the sacredness of correspondence.  The letters one receives
+are in one sense not his own.  They contain the confessions of another
+soul, the confidences of another mind, that would be rudely treated if
+given any sort of publicity.  And while husband and wife are one to each
+other, they are two in the eyes of other people, and it may well happen
+that a friend will desire to impart something to a discreet woman which
+she would not intrust to the babbling husband of that woman.  Every life
+must have its own privacy and its own place of retirement.  The letter is
+of all things the most personal and intimate thing.  Its bloom is gone
+when another eye sees it before the one for which it was intended.  Its
+aroma all escapes when it is first opened by another person.  One might
+as well wear second-hand clothing as get a second-hand letter.  Here,
+then, is a sacred right that ought to be respected, and can be respected
+without any injury to domestic life.  The habit in some families for the
+members of it to show each other's letters is a most disenchanting one.
+It is just in the family, between persons most intimate, that these
+delicacies of consideration for the privacy of each ought to be most
+respected.  No one can estimate probably how much of the refinement, of
+the delicacy of feeling, has been lost to the world by the introduction
+of the postal-card.  Anything written on a postal-card has no
+personality; it is banal, and has as little power of charming any one who
+receives it as an advertisement in the newspaper.  It is not simply the
+cheapness of the communication that is vulgar, but the publicity of it.
+One may have perhaps only a cent's worth of affection to send, but it
+seems worth much more when enclosed in an envelope.  We have no doubt,
+then, that on general principles the French decision is a mistake, and
+that it tends rather to vulgarize than to retain the purity and delicacy
+of the marriage relation.  And the judges, so long even as men only
+occupy the bench, will no doubt reverse it when the logical march of
+events forces upon them the question whether the wife may open her
+husband's letters.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A LEISURE CLASS
+
+Foreign critics have apologized for real or imagined social and literary
+shortcomings in this country on the ground that the American people have
+little leisure.  It is supposed that when we have a leisure class we
+shall not only make a better showing in these respects, but we shall be
+as agreeable--having time to devote to the art of being agreeable--as the
+English are.  But we already have a considerable and increasing number of
+people who can command their own time if we have not a leisure class, and
+the sociologist might begin to study the effect of this leisureliness
+upon society.  Are the people who, by reason of a competence or other
+accidents of good-fortune, have most leisure, becoming more agreeable?
+and are they devoting themselves to the elevation of the social tone, or
+to the improvement of our literature?  However this question is answered,
+a strong appeal might be made to the people of leisure to do not only
+what is expected of them by foreign observers, but to take advantage of
+their immense opportunities.  In a republic there is no room for a
+leisure class that is not useful.  Those who use their time merely to
+kill it, in imitation of those born to idleness and to no necessity of
+making an exertion, may be ornamental, but having no root in any
+established privilege to sustain them, they will soon wither away in this
+atmosphere, as a flower would which should set up to be an orchid when it
+does not belong to the orchid family.  It is required here that those who
+are emancipated from the daily grind should vindicate their right to
+their position not only by setting an example of self-culture, but by
+contributing something to the general welfare.  It is thought by many
+that if society here were established and settled as it is elsewhere, the
+rich would be less dominated by their money and less conscious of it, and
+having leisure, could devote themselves even more than they do now to
+intellectual and spiritual pursuits.
+
+Whether these anticipations will ever be realized, and whether increased
+leisure will make us all happy, is a subject of importance; but it is
+secondary, and in a manner incidental, to another and deeper matter,
+which may be defined as the responsibility of attractiveness.  And this
+responsibility takes two forms the duty of every one to be attractive,
+and the danger of being too attractive.  To be winning and agreeable is
+sometimes reckoned a gift, but it is a disposition that can be
+cultivated; and, in a world so given to grippe and misapprehension as
+this is, personal attractiveness becomes a duty, if it is not an art,
+that might be taught in the public schools.  It used to be charged
+against New Englanders that they regarded this gift as of little value,
+and were inclined to hide it under a bushel, and it was said of some of
+their neighbors in the Union that they exaggerated its importance, and
+neglected the weightier things of the law.  Indeed, disputes have arisen
+as to what attractiveness consisted in--some holding that beauty or charm
+of manner (which is almost as good) and sweetness and gayety were
+sufficient, while others held that a little intelligence sprinkled in was
+essential.  But one thing is clear, that while women were held to strict
+responsibility in this matter, not stress enough was laid upon the equal
+duty of men to be attractive in order to make the world agreeable.  Hence
+it is, probably, that while no question has been raised as to the effect
+of the higher education upon the attractiveness of men, the colleges for
+girls have been jealously watched as to the effect they were likely to
+have upon the attractiveness of women.  Whether the college years of a
+young man, during which he knows more than he will ever know again, are
+his most attractive period is not considered, for he is expected to
+develop what is in him later on; but it is gravely questioned whether
+girls who give their minds to the highest studies are not dropping those
+graces of personal attractiveness which they will find it difficult to
+pick up again.  Of course such a question as this could never arise
+except in just such a world as this is.  For in an ideal world it could
+be shown that the highest intelligence and the highest personal charm are
+twins.  If, therefore, it should turn out, which seems absurd, that
+college-educated girls are not as attractive as other women with less
+advantages, it will have to be admitted that something is the matter with
+the young ladies, which is preposterous, or that the system is still
+defective.  For the postulate that everybody ought to be attractive
+cannot be abandoned for the sake of any system.  Decision on this system
+cannot be reached without long experience, for it is always to be
+remembered that the man's point of view of attractiveness may shift, and
+he may come to regard the intellectual graces as supremely attractive;
+while, on the other hand, the woman student may find that a winning smile
+is just as effective in bringing a man to her feet, where he belongs, as
+a logarithm.
+
+The danger of being too attractive, though it has historic illustration,
+is thought by many to be more apparent than real.  Merely being too
+attractive has often been confounded with a love of flirtation and
+conquest, unbecoming always in a man, and excused in a woman on the
+ground of her helplessness.  It could easily be shown that to use
+personal attractiveness recklessly to the extent of hopeless beguilement
+is cruel, and it may be admitted that woman ought to be held to strict
+responsibility for her attractiveness.  The lines are indeed hard for
+her.  The duty is upon her in this poor world of being as attractive as
+she can, and yet she is held responsible for all the mischief her
+attractiveness produces.  As if the blazing sun should be called to
+account by people with weak eyes.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WEATHER AND CHARACTER
+
+The month of February in all latitudes in the United States is uncertain.
+The birth of George Washington in it has not raised it in public esteem.
+In the North, it is a month to flee from; in the South, at best it is a
+waiting month--a month of rain and fickle skies.  A good deal has been
+done for it.  It is the month of St. Valentine, it is distinguished by
+the leap-year addition of a day, and ought to be a favorite of the gentle
+sex; but it remains a sort of off period in the year.  Its brevity
+recommends it, but no one would take any notice of it were it not for its
+effect upon character.  A month of rigid weather is supposed to brace up
+the moral nature, and a month of gentleness is supposed to soften the
+asperities of the disposition, but February contributes to neither of
+these ends.  It is neither a tonic nor a soother; that is, in most parts
+of our inexplicable land.  We make no complaint of this.  It is probably
+well to have a period in the year that tests character to the utmost, and
+the person who can enter spring through the gate of February a better man
+or woman is likely to adorn society the rest of the year.
+
+February, however, is merely an illustration of the effect of weather
+upon the disposition.  Persons differ in regard to their sensitiveness to
+cloudy, rainy, and gloomy days.  We recognize this in a general way, but
+the relation of temper and disposition to the weather has never been
+scientifically studied.  Our observation of the influence of climate is
+mostly with regard to physical infirmities.  We know the effect of damp
+weather upon rheumatics, and of the east wind upon gouty subjects, but
+too little allowance is made for the influence of weather upon the
+spirits and the conduct of men.  We know that a long period of gloomy
+weather leads to suicides, and we observe that long-continued clouds and
+rain beget "crossness" and ill-temper, and we are all familiar with the
+universal exhilaration of sunshine and clear air upon any company of men
+and women.  But the point we wish to make is that neither society nor the
+law makes any allowance for the aberrations of human nature caused by
+dull and unpleasant weather.  And this is very singular in this
+humanitarian age, when excuse is found for nearly every moral delinquency
+in heredity or environment, that the greatest factor of discontent and
+crookedness, the weather, should be left out of consideration altogether.
+The relation of crime to the temperature and the humidity of the
+atmosphere is not taken into account.  Yet crime and eccentricity of
+conduct are very much the result of atmospheric conditions, since they
+depend upon the temper and the spirit of the community.  Many people are
+habitually blue and down-hearted in sour weather; a long spell of cloudy,
+damp, cold weather depresses everybody, lowers hope, tends to melancholy;
+and people when they are not cheerful are more apt to fall into evil
+ways, as a rule, than when they are in a normal state of good-humor.  And
+aside from crimes, the vexation, the friction, the domestic discontent in
+life, are provoked by bad weather.  We should like to have some
+statistics as to incompatibility between married couples produced by damp
+and raw days, and to know whether divorces are more numerous in the
+States that suffer from a fickle climate than in those where the climate
+is more equable.  It is true that in the Sandwich Islands and in Egypt
+there is greater mental serenity, less perturbation of spirit, less
+worry, than in the changeable United States.  Something of this placidity
+and resignation to the ills inevitable in human life is due to an even
+climate, to the constant sun and the dry air.  We cannot hope to prevent
+crime and suffering by statistics, any more than we have been able to
+improve our climate (which is rather worse now than before the scientists
+took it in charge) by observations and telegraphic reports; but we can,
+by careful tabulation of the effects of bad weather upon the spirits of a
+community, learn what places in the Union are favorable to the production
+of cheerfulness and an equal mind.  And we should lift a load of
+reprobation from some places which now have a reputation for surliness
+and unamiability.  We find the people of one place hospitable,
+lighthearted, and agreeable; the people of another place cold, and
+morose, and unpleasant.  It would be a satisfaction to know that the
+weather is responsible for the difference.  Observation of this sort
+would also teach us doubtless what places are most conducive to literary
+production, what to happy homes and agreeing wives and husbands.  All our
+territory is mapped out as to its sanitary conditions; why not have it
+colored as to its effect upon the spirits and the enjoyment of life?  The
+suggestion opens a vast field of investigation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BORN WITH AN "EGO"
+
+There used to be a notion going round that it would be a good thing for
+people if they were more "self-centred."  Perhaps there was talk of
+adding a course to the college curriculum, in addition to that for
+training the all-competent "journalist," for the self-centring of the
+young.  To apply the term to a man or woman was considered highly
+complimentary.  The advisers of this state of mind probably meant to
+suggest a desirable equilibrium and mental balance; but the actual effect
+of the self-centred training is illustrated by a story told of Thomas H.
+Benton, who had been described as an egotist by some of the newspapers.
+Meeting Colonel Frank Blair one day, he said: "Colonel Blair, I see that
+the newspapers call me an egotist.  I wish you would tell me frankly, as
+a friend, if you think the charge is true."  "It is a very direct
+question, Mr. Benton," replied Colonel Blair, "but if you want my honest
+opinion, I am compelled to say that I think there is some foundation for
+the charge."  "Well, sir," said Mr. Benton, throwing his head back and
+his chest forward, "the difference between me and these little fellows is
+that I have an EGO!"  Mr. Benton was an interesting man, and it is a fair
+consideration if a certain amount of egotism does not add to the interest
+of any character, but at the same time the self-centred conditions shut a
+person off from one of the chief enjoyments to be got out of this world,
+namely, a recognition of what is admirable in others in a toleration of
+peculiarities.  It is odd, almost amusing, to note how in this country
+people of one section apply their local standards to the judgment of
+people in other sections, very much as an Englishman uses his insular
+yardstick to measure all the rest of the world.  It never seems to occur
+to people in one locality that the manners and speech of those of another
+may be just as admirable as their own, and they get a good deal of
+discomfort out of their intercourse with strangers by reason of their
+inability to adapt themselves to any ways not their own.  It helps
+greatly to make this country interesting that nearly every State has its
+peculiarities, and that the inhabitants of different sections differ in
+manner and speech.  But next to an interesting person in social value, is
+an agreeable one, and it would add vastly to the agreeableness of life if
+our widely spread provinces were not so self-centred in their notion that
+their own way is the best, to the degree that they criticise any
+deviation from it as an eccentricity.  It would be a very nice world in
+these United States if we could all devote ourselves to finding out in
+communities what is likable rather than what is opposed to our
+experience; that is, in trying to adapt ourselves to others rather than
+insisting that our own standard should measure our opinion and our
+enjoyment of them.
+
+When the Kentuckian describes a man as a "high-toned gentleman" he means
+exactly the same that a Bostonian means when, he says that a man is a
+"very good fellow," only the men described have a different culture, a
+different personal flavor; and it is fortunate that the Kentuckian is not
+like the Bostonian, for each has a quality that makes intercourse with
+him pleasant.  In the South many people think they have said a severe
+thing when they say that a person or manner is thoroughly Yankee; and
+many New Englanders intend to express a considerable lack in what is
+essential when they say of men and women that they are very Southern.
+When the Yankee is produced he may turn out a cosmopolitan person of the
+most interesting and agreeable sort; and the Southerner may
+have traits and peculiarities, growing out of climate and social life
+unlike the New England, which are altogether charming.  We talked once
+with a Western man of considerable age and experience who had the placid
+mind that is sometimes, and may more and more become, the characteristic
+of those who live in flat countries of illimitable horizons, who said
+that New Yorkers, State and city, all had an assertive sort of smartness
+that was very disagreeable to him.  And a lady of New York (a city whose
+dialect the novelists are beginning to satirize) was much disturbed by
+the flatness of speech prevailing in Chicago, and thought something
+should be done in the public schools to correct the pronunciation of
+English.  There doubtless should be a common standard of distinct,
+rounded, melodious pronunciation, as there is of good breeding, and it is
+quite as important to cultivate the voice in speaking as in singing, but
+the people of the United States let themselves be immensely irritated by
+local differences and want of toleration of sectional peculiarities.  The
+truth is that the agreeable people are pretty evenly distributed over the
+country, and one's enjoyment of them is heightened not only by their
+differences of manner, but by the different, ways in which they look at
+life, unless he insists upon applying everywhere the yardstick of his own
+locality.  If the Boston woman sets her eyeglasses at a critical angle
+towards the 'laisser faire' flow of social amenity in New Orleans, and
+the New Orleans woman seeks out only the prim and conventional in Boston,
+each may miss the opportunity to supplement her life by something wanting
+and desirable in it, to be gained by the exercise of more openness of
+mind and toleration.  To some people Yankee thrift is disagreeable; to
+others, Southern shiftlessness is intolerable.  To some travelers the
+negro of the South, with his tropical nature, his capacity for
+picturesque attitudes, his abundant trust in Providence, is an element of
+restfulness; and if the chief object of life is happiness, the traveler
+may take a useful hint from the race whose utmost desire, in a fit
+climate, would be fully satisfied by a shirt and a banana-tree.  But to
+another traveler the dusky, careless race is a continual affront.
+
+If a person is born with an "Ego," and gets the most enjoyment out of the
+world by trying to make it revolve about himself, and cannot make-
+allowances for differences, we have nothing to say except to express pity
+for such a self-centred condition; which shuts him out of the never-
+failing pleasure there is in entering into and understanding with
+sympathy the almost infinite variety in American life.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JUVENTUS MUNDI
+
+Sometimes the world seems very old.  It appeared so to Bernard of Cluny
+in the twelfth century, when he wrote:
+
+               "The world is very evil,
+               The times are waning late."
+
+There was a general impression among the Christians of the first century
+of our era that the end was near.  The world must have seemed very
+ancient to the Egyptians fifteen hundred years before Christ, when the
+Pyramid of Cheops was a relic of antiquity, when almost the whole circle
+of arts, sciences, and literature had been run through, when every nation
+within reach had been conquered, when woman had been developed into one
+of the most fascinating of beings, and even reigned more absolutely than
+Elizabeth or Victoria has reigned since: it was a pretty tired old world
+at that time.  One might almost say that the further we go back the older
+and more "played out" the world appears, notwithstanding that the poets,
+who were generally pessimists of the present, kept harping about the
+youth of the world and the joyous spontaneity of human life in some
+golden age before their time.  In fact, the world is old in spots--in
+Memphis and Boston and Damascus and Salem and Ephesus.  Some of these
+places are venerable in traditions, and some of them are actually worn
+out and taking a rest from too much civilization--lying fallow, as the
+saying is.  But age is so entirely relative that to many persons the
+landing of the Mayflower seems more remote than the voyage of Jason, and
+a Mayflower chest a more antique piece of furniture than the timbers of
+the Ark, which some believe can still be seen on top of Mount Ararat.
+But, speaking generally, the world is still young and growing, and a
+considerable portion of it unfinished.  The oldest part, indeed, the
+Laurentian Hills, which were first out of water, is still only sparsely
+settled; and no one pretends that Florida is anything like finished, or
+that the delta of the Mississippi is in anything more than the process of
+formation.  Men are so young and lively in these days that they cannot
+wait for the slow processes of nature, but they fill up and bank up
+places, like Holland, where they can live; and they keep on exploring and
+discovering incongruous regions, like Alaska, where they can go and
+exercise their juvenile exuberance.
+
+In many respects the world has been growing younger ever since the
+Christian era.  A new spirit came into it then which makes youth
+perpetual, a spirit of living in others, which got the name of universal
+brotherhood, a spirit that has had a good many discouragements and set-
+backs, but which, on the whole, gains ground, and generally works in
+harmony with the scientific spirit, breaking down the exclusive character
+of the conquests of nature.  What used to be the mystery and occultism of
+the few is now general knowledge, so that all the playing at occultism by
+conceited people now seems jejune and foolish.  A little machine called
+the instantaneous photograph takes pictures as quickly and accurately as
+the human eye does, and besides makes them permanent.  Instead of fooling
+credulous multitudes with responses from Delphi, we have a Congress which
+can enact tariff regulations susceptible of interpretations enough to
+satisfy the love of mystery of the entire nation.  Instead of loafing
+round Memnon at sunrise to catch some supernatural tones, we talk words
+into a little contrivance which will repeat our words and tones to the
+remotest generation of those who shall be curious to know whether we said
+those words in jest or earnest.  All these mysteries made common and
+diffused certainly increase the feeling of the equality of opportunity in
+the world.  And day by day such wonderful things are discovered and
+scattered abroad that we are warranted in believing that we are only on
+the threshold of turning to account the hidden forces of nature.  There
+would be great danger of human presumption and conceit in this progress
+if the conceit were not so widely diffused, and where we are all
+conceited there is no one to whom it will appear unpleasant.  If there
+was only one person who knew about the telephone he would be unbearable.
+Probably the Eiffel Tower would be stricken down as a monumental
+presumption, like that of Babel, if it had not been raised with the full
+knowledge and consent of all the world.
+
+This new spirit, with its multiform manifestations, which came into the
+world nearly nineteen hundred years ago, is sometimes called the spirit
+of Christmas.  And good reasons can be given for supposing that it is.
+At any rate, those nations that have the most of it are the most
+prosperous, and those people who have the most of it are the most
+agreeable to associate with.  Know all men by these Presents, is an old
+legal form which has come to have a new meaning in this dispensation.
+It is by the spirit of brotherhood exhibited in giving presents that we
+know the Christmas proper, only we are apt to take it in too narrow a
+way.  The real spirit of Christmas is the general diffusion of
+helpfulness and good-will.  If somebody were to discover an elixir which
+would make every one truthful, he would not, in this age of the world,
+patent it.  Indeed, the Patent Office would not let him make a corner on
+virtue as he does in wheat; and it is not respectable any more among the
+real children of Christmas to make a corner in wheat.  The world, to be
+sure, tolerates still a great many things that it does not approve of,
+and, on the whole, Christmas, as an ameliorating and good-fellowship
+institution, gains a little year by year.  There is still one hitch about
+it, and a bad one just now, namely, that many people think they can buy
+its spirit by jerks of liberality, by costly gifts.  Whereas the fact is
+that a great many of the costliest gifts in this season do not count at
+all.  Crumbs from the rich man's table don't avail any more to open the
+pearly gates even of popular esteem in this world.  Let us say, in fine,
+that a loving, sympathetic heart is better than a nickel-plated service
+in this world, which is surely growing young and sympathetic.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A BEAUTIFUL OLD AGE
+
+In Autumn the thoughts lightly turn to Age.  If the writer has seemed to
+be interested, sometimes to the neglect of other topics, in the American
+young woman, it was not because she is interested in herself, but because
+she is on the way to be one of the most agreeable objects in this lovely
+world.  She may struggle against it; she may resist it by all the
+legitimate arts of the coquette and the chemist; she may be convinced
+that youth and beauty are inseparable allies; but she would have more
+patience if she reflected that the sunset is often finer than the
+sunrise, commonly finer than noon, especially after a stormy day.  The
+secret of a beautiful old age is as well worth seeking as that of a
+charming young maidenhood.  For it is one of the compensations for the
+rest of us, in the decay of this mortal life, that women, whose mission
+it is to allure in youth and to tinge the beginning of the world with
+romance, also make the end of the world more serenely satisfactory and
+beautiful than the outset.  And this has been done without any amendment
+to the Constitution of the United States; in fact, it is possible that
+the Sixteenth Amendment would rather hinder than help this gracious
+process.  We are not speaking now of what is called growing old
+gracefully and regretfully, as something to be endured, but as a season
+to be desired for itself, at least by those whose privilege it is to be
+ennobled and cheered by it.  And we are not speaking of wicked old women.
+There is a unique fascination--all the novelists recognize it--in a
+wicked old woman; not very wicked, but a woman of abundant experience,
+who is perfectly frank and a little cynical, and delights in probing
+human nature and flashing her wit on its weaknesses, and who knows as
+much about life as a club man is credited with knowing.  She may not be a
+good comrade for the young, but she is immensely more fascinating than a
+semi-wicked old man.  Why, we do not know; that is one of the
+unfathomable mysteries of womanhood.  No; we have in mind quite another
+sort of woman, of which America has so many that they are a very
+noticeable element in all cultivated society.  And the world has nothing
+more lovely.  For there is a loveliness or fascination sometimes in women
+between the ages of sixty and eighty that is unlike any other--a charm
+that woos us to regard autumn as beautiful as spring.
+
+Perhaps these women were great beauties in their day, but scarcely so
+serenely beautiful as now when age has refined all that was most
+attractive.  Perhaps they were plain; but it does not matter, for the
+subtle influence of spiritualized-intelligence has the power of
+transforming plainness into the beauty of old age.  Physical beauty is
+doubtless a great advantage, and it is never lost if mind shines through
+it (there is nothing so unlovely as a frivolous old woman fighting to
+keep the skin-deep beauty of her youth); the eyes, if the life has not
+been one of physical suffering, usually retain their power of moving
+appeal; the lines of the face, if changed, may be refined by a certain
+spirituality; the gray hair gives dignity and softness and the charm of
+contrast; the low sweet voice vibrates to the same note of femininity,
+and the graceful and gracious are graceful and gracious still.  Even into
+the face and bearing of the plain woman whose mind has grown, whose
+thoughts have been pure, whose heart has been expanded by good deeds or
+by constant affection, comes a beauty winning and satisfactory in the
+highest degree.
+
+It is not that the charm of the women of whom we speak is mainly this
+physical beauty; that is only incidental, as it were.  The delight in
+their society has a variety of sources.  Their interest in life is
+broader than it once was, more sympathetically unselfish; they have a
+certain philosophical serenity that is not inconsistent with great
+liveliness of mind; they have got rid of so much nonsense; they can
+afford to be truthful--and how much there is to be learned from a woman
+who is truthful! they have a most delicious courage of opinion, about
+men, say, and in politics, and social topics, and creeds even.  They have
+very little any longer to conceal; that is, in regard to things that
+should be thought about and talked about at all.  They are not afraid to
+be gay, and to have enthusiasms.  At sixty and eighty a refined and well-
+bred woman is emancipated in the best way, and in the enjoyment of the
+full play of the richest qualities of her womanhood.  She is as far from
+prudery as from the least note of vulgarity.  Passion, perhaps, is
+replaced by a great capacity for friendliness, and she was never more a
+real woman than in these mellow and reflective days.  And how interesting
+she is--adding so much knowledge of life to the complex interest that
+inheres in her sex!  Knowledge of life, yes, and of affairs; for it must
+be said of these ladies we have in mind that they keep up with the
+current thought, that they are readers of books, even of newspapers--for
+even the newspaper can be helpful and not harmful in the alembic of their
+minds.
+
+Let not the purpose of this paper be misunderstood.  It is not to urge
+young women to become old or to act like old women.  The independence and
+frankness of age might not be becoming to them.  They must stumble along
+as best they can, alternately attracting and repelling, until by right of
+years they join that serene company which is altogether beautiful.  There
+is a natural unfolding and maturing to the beauty of old age.  The
+mission of woman, about which we are pretty weary of hearing, is not
+accomplished by any means in her years of vernal bloom and loveliness;
+she has equal power to bless and sweeten life in the autumn of her
+pilgrimage.  But here is an apologue: The peach, from blossom to
+maturity, is the most attractive of fruits.  Yet the demands of the
+market, competition, and fashion often cause it to be plucked and shipped
+while green.  It never matures, though it may take a deceptive richness
+of color; it decays without ripening.  And the last end of that peach is
+worse than the first.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ATTRACTION OF THE REPULSIVE
+
+On one of the most charming of the many wonderfully picturesque little
+beaches on the Pacific coast, near Monterey, is the idlest if not the
+most disagreeable social group in the world.  Just off the shore, farther
+than a stone's-throw, lies a mass of broken rocks.  The surf comes
+leaping and laughing in, sending up, above the curving green breakers and
+crests of foam, jets and spirals of water which flash like silver
+fountains in the sunlight. These islets of rocks are the homes of the
+sea-lion.  This loafer of the coast congregates here by the thousand.
+Sometimes the rocks are quite covered, the smooth rounded surface of the
+larger one presenting the appearance at a distance of a knoll dotted with
+dirty sheep.  There is generally a select knot of a dozen floating about
+in the still water under the lee of the rock, bobbing up their tails and
+flippers very much as black driftwood might heave about in the tide.
+During certain parts of the day members of this community are off fishing
+in deep water; but what they like best to do is to crawl up on the rocks
+and grunt and bellow, or go to sleep in the sun. Some of them lie half in
+water, their tails floating and their ungainly heads wagging.  These
+uneasy ones are always wriggling out or plunging in.  Some crawl to the
+tops of the rocks and lie like gunny bags stuffed with meal, or they
+repose on the broken surfaces like masses of jelly.  When they are all at
+home the rocks have not room for them, and they crawl on and over each
+other, and lie like piles of undressed pork.  In the water they are
+black, but when they are dry in the sun the skin becomes a dirty light
+brown.  Many of them are huge fellows, with a body as big as an ox.  In
+the water they are repulsively graceful; on the rocks they are as
+ungainly as boneless cows, or hogs that have lost their shape in
+prosperity.  Summer and winter (and it is almost always summer on this
+coast) these beasts, which are well fitted neither for land nor water,
+spend their time in absolute indolence, except when they are compelled to
+cruise around in the deep water for food.  They are of no use to anybody,
+either for their skin or their flesh.  Nothing could be more thoroughly
+disgusting and uncanny than they are, and yet nothing more fascinating.
+One can watch them--the irresponsible, formless lumps of intelligent
+flesh--for hours without tiring.  I scarcely know what the fascination
+is.  A small seal playing by himself near the shore, floating on and
+diving under the breakers, is not so very disagreeable, especially if he
+comes so near that you can see his pathetic eyes; but these brutes in
+this perpetual summer resort are disgustingly attractive.  Nearly
+everything about them, including their voice, is repulsive.  Perhaps it
+is the absolute idleness of the community that makes it so interesting.
+To fish, to swim, to snooze on the rocks, that is all, for ever and ever.
+No past, no future.  A society that lives for the laziest sort of
+pleasure.  If they were rich, what more could they have?  Is not this the
+ideal of a watering-place life?
+
+The spectacle of this happy community ought to teach us humility and
+charity in judgment.  Perhaps the philosophy of its attractiveness lies
+deeper than its 'dolce far niente' existence.  We may never have
+considered the attraction for us of the disagreeable, the positive
+fascination of the uncommonly ugly.  The repulsive fascination of the
+loathly serpent or dragon for women can hardly be explained on
+theological grounds.  Some cranks have maintained that the theory of
+gravitation alone does not explain the universe, that repulsion is as
+necessary as attraction in our economy.  This may apply to society.  We
+are all charmed with the luxuriance of a semi-tropical landscape, so
+violently charmed that we become in time tired of its overpowering bloom
+and color.  But what is the charm of the wide, treeless desert, the
+leagues of sand and burnt-up chaparral, the distant savage, fantastic
+mountains, the dry desolation as of a world burnt out?  It is not
+contrast altogether.  For this illimitable waste has its own charm; and
+again and again, when we come to a world of vegetation, where the vision
+is shut in by beauty, we shall have an irrepressible longing for these
+wind-swept plains as wide as the sea, with the ashy and pink horizons.
+We shall long to be weary of it all again--its vast nakedness, its
+shimmering heat, its cold, star-studded nights.  It seems paradoxical,
+but it is probably true, that a society composed altogether of agreeable
+people would become a terrible bore.  We are a "kittle" lot, and hard to
+please for long.  We know how it is in the matter of climate.  Why is it
+that the masses of the human race live in the most disagreeable climates
+to be found on the globe, subject to extremes of heat and cold, sudden
+and unprovoked changes, frosts, fogs, malarias?  In such regions they
+congregate, and seem to like the vicissitudes, to like the excitement of
+the struggle with the weather and the patent medicines to keep alive.
+They hate the agreeable monotony of one genial day following another the
+year through.  They praise this monotony, all literature is full of it;
+people always say they are in search of the equable climate; but they
+continue to live, nevertheless, or try to live, in the least equable; and
+if they can find one spot more disagreeable than another there they build
+a big city.  If man could make his ideal climate he would probably be
+dissatisfied with it in a month.  The effect of climate upon disposition
+and upon manners needs to be considered some day; but we are now only
+trying to understand the attractiveness of the disagreeable.  There must
+be some reason for it; and that would explain a social phenomenon, why
+there are so many unattractive people, and why the attractive readers of
+these essays could not get on without them.
+
+The writer of this once traveled for days with an intelligent curmudgeon,
+who made himself at all points as prickly as the porcupine.  There was no
+getting on with him.  And yet when he dropped out of the party he was
+sorely missed.  He was more attractively repulsive than the sea-lion.  It
+was such a luxury to hate him.  He was such a counter-irritant, such a
+stimulant; such a flavor he gave to life.  We are always on the lookout
+for the odd, the eccentric, the whimsical.  We pretend that we like the
+orderly, the beautiful, the pleasant.  We can find them anywhere--the
+little bits of scenery that please the eye, the pleasant households, the
+group of delightful people.  Why travel, then?  We want the abnormal, the
+strong, the ugly, the unusual at least.  We wish to be startled and
+stirred up and repelled.  And we ought to be more thankful than we are
+that there are so many desolate and wearisome and fantastic places, and
+so many tiresome and unattractive people in this lovely world.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+GIVING AS A LUXURY
+
+There must be something very good in human nature, or people would not
+experience so much pleasure in giving; there must be something very bad
+in human nature, or more people would try the experiment of giving.
+Those who do try it become enamored of it, and get their chief pleasure
+in life out of it; and so evident is this that there is some basis for
+the idea that it is ignorance rather than badness which keeps so many
+people from being generous.  Of course it may become a sort of
+dissipation, or more than that, a devastation, as many men who have what
+are called "good wives" have reason to know, in the gradual disappearance
+of their wardrobe if they chance to lay aside any of it temporarily.
+The amount that a good woman can give away is only measured by her
+opportunity.  Her mind becomes so trained in the mystery of this pleasure
+that she experiences no thrill of delight in giving away only the things
+her husband does not want.  Her office in life is to teach him the joy of
+self-sacrifice.  She and all other habitual and irreclaimable givers soon
+find out that there is next to no pleasure in a gift unless it involves
+some self-denial.
+
+Let one consider seriously whether he ever gets as much satisfaction out
+of a gift received as out of one given.  It pleases him for the moment,
+and if it is useful, for a long time; he turns it over, and admires it;
+he may value it as a token of affection, and it flatters his self-esteem
+that he is the object of it.  But it is a transient feeling compared with
+that he has when he has made a gift.  That substantially ministers to his
+self-esteem.  He follows the gift; he dwells upon the delight of the
+receiver; his imagination plays about it; it will never wear out or
+become stale; having parted with it, it is for him a lasting possession.
+It is an investment as lasting as that in the debt of England.  Like a
+good deed, it grows, and is continually satisfactory.  It is something to
+think of when he first wakes in the morning--a time when most people are
+badly put to it for want of something pleasant to think of.  This fact
+about giving is so incontestably true that it is a wonder that
+enlightened people do not more freely indulge in giving for their own
+comfort.  It is, above all else, amazing that so many imagine they are
+going to get any satisfaction out of what they leave by will.  They may
+be in a state where they will enjoy it, if the will is not fought over;
+but it is shocking how little gratitude there is accorded to a departed
+giver compared to a living giver.  He couldn't take the property with
+him, it is said; he was obliged to leave it to somebody.  By this thought
+his generosity is always reduced to a minimum.  He may build a monument
+to himself in some institution, but we do not know enough of the world to
+which he has gone to know whether a tiny monument on this earth is any
+satisfaction to a person who is free of the universe.  Whereas every
+giving or deed of real humanity done while he was living would have
+entered into his character, and would be of lasting service to him--that
+is, in any future which we can conceive.
+
+Of course we are not confining our remarks to what are called Christmas
+gifts--commercially so called--nor would we undertake to estimate the
+pleasure there is in either receiving or giving these.  The shrewd
+manufacturers of the world have taken notice of the periodic generosity
+of the race, and ingeniously produce articles to serve it, that is, to
+anticipate the taste and to thwart all individuality or spontaneity in
+it.  There is, in short, what is called a "line of holiday goods,"
+fitting, it may be supposed, the periodic line of charity.  When a person
+receives some of these things in the blessed season of such, he is apt to
+be puzzled.  He wants to know what they are for, what he is to do with
+them.  If there are no "directions" on the articles, his gratitude is
+somewhat tempered.  He has seen these nondescripts of ingenuity and
+expense in the shop windows, but he never expected to come into personal
+relations to them.  He is puzzled, and he cannot escape the unpleasant
+feeling that commerce has put its profit-making fingers into Christmas.
+Such a lot of things seem to be manufactured on purpose that people may
+perform a duty that is expected of them in the holidays.  The house is
+full of these impossible things; they occupy the mantelpieces, they stand
+about on the tottering little tables, they are ingenious, they are made
+for wants yet undiscovered, they tarnish, they break, they will not
+"work," and pretty soon they look "second-hand."  Yet there must be more
+satisfaction in giving these articles than in receiving them, and maybe a
+spice of malice--not that of course, for in the holidays nearly every
+gift expresses at least kindly remembrance--but if you give them you do
+not have to live with them.  But consider how full the world is of
+holiday goods--costly goods too--that are of no earthly use, and are not
+even artistic, and how short life is, and how many people actually need
+books and other indispensable articles, and how starved are many fine
+drawing-rooms, not for holiday goods, but for objects of beauty.
+
+Christmas stands for much, and for more and more in a world that is
+breaking down its barriers of race and religious intolerance, and one of
+its chief offices has been supposed to be the teaching of men the
+pleasure there is in getting rid of some of their possessions for the
+benefit of others.  But this frittering away a good instinct and tendency
+in conventional giving of manufactures made to suit an artificial
+condition is hardly in the line of developing the spirit that shares the
+last crust or gives to the thirsty companion in the desert the first pull
+at the canteen.  Of course Christmas feeling is the life of trade and all
+that, and we will be the last to discourage any sort of giving, for one
+can scarcely disencumber himself of anything in his passage through this
+world and not be benefited; but the hint may not be thrown away that one
+will personally get more satisfaction out of his periodic or continual
+benevolence if he gives during his life the things which he wants and
+other people need, and reserves for a fine show in his will a collected
+but not selected mass of holiday goods.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CLIMATE AND HAPPINESS
+
+The idea of the relation of climate to happiness is modern.  It is
+probably born of the telegraph and of the possibility of rapid travel,
+and it is more disturbing to serenity of mind than any other.  Providence
+had so ordered it that if we sat still in almost any region of the globe
+except the tropics we would have, in course of the year, almost all the
+kinds of climate that exist.  The ancient societies did not trouble
+themselves about the matter; they froze or thawed, were hot or cold, as
+it pleased the gods.  They did not think of fleeing from winter any more
+than from the summer solstice, and consequently they enjoyed a certain
+contentment of mind that is absent from modern life.  We are more
+intelligent, and therefore more discontented and unhappy.  We are always
+trying to escape winter when we are not trying to escape summer.  We are
+half the time 'in transitu', flying hither and thither, craving that
+exact adaptation of the weather to our whimsical bodies promised only to
+the saints who seek a "better country."  There are places, to be sure,
+where nature is in a sort of equilibrium, but usually those are places
+where we can neither make money nor spend it to our satisfaction.  They
+lack either any stimulus to ambition or a historic association, and we
+soon find that the mind insists upon being cared for quite as much as the
+body.
+
+How many wanderers in the past winter left comfortable homes in the
+United States to seek a mild climate!  Did they find it in the sleet and
+bone-piercing cold of Paris, or anywhere in France, where the wolves were
+forced to come into the villages in the hope of picking up a tender
+child?  If they traveled farther, were the railway carriages anything but
+refrigerators tempered by cans of cooling water?  Was there a place in
+Europe from Spain to Greece, where the American could once be warm--
+really warm without effort--in or out of doors?  Was it any better in
+divine Florence than on the chill Riviera?  Northern Italy was blanketed
+with snow, the Apennines were white, and through the clean streets of the
+beautiful town a raw wind searched every nook and corner, penetrating
+through the thickest of English wraps, and harder to endure than
+ingratitude, while a frosty mist enveloped all.  The traveler forgot to
+bring with him the contented mind of the Italian.  Could he go about in a
+long cloak and a slouch hat, curl up in doorways out of the blast, and be
+content in a feeling of his own picturesqueness?  Could he sit all day on
+the stone pavement and hold out his chilblained hand for soldi?  Could he
+even deceive himself, in a palatial apartment with a frescoed ceiling, by
+an appearance of warmth in two sticks ignited by a pine cone set in an
+aperture in one end of the vast room, and giving out scarcely heat enough
+to drive the swallows from the chimney?  One must be born to this sort of
+thing in order to enjoy it.  He needs the poetic temperament which can
+feel in January the breath of June.  The pampered American is not adapted
+to this kind of pleasure.  He is very crude, not to say barbarous, yet in
+many of his tastes, but he has reached one of the desirable things in
+civilization, and that is a thorough appreciation of physical comfort.
+He has had the ingenuity to protect himself in his own climate, but when
+he travels he is at the mercy of customs and traditions in which the idea
+of physical comfort is still rudimentary.  He cannot warm himself before
+a group of statuary, or extract heat from a canvas by Raphael, nor keep
+his teeth from chattering by the exquisite view from the Boboli Gardens.
+The cold American is insensible to art, and shivers in the presence of
+the warmest historical associations.  It is doubtful if there is a spot
+in Europe where he can be ordinarily warm in winter.  The world, indeed,
+does not care whether he is warm or not, but it is a matter of great
+importance to him.  As he wanders from palace to palace--and he cannot
+escape the impression that nothing is good enough for him except a
+palace--he cannot think of any cottage in any hamlet in America that is
+not more comfortable in winter than any palace he can find.  And so he is
+driven on in cold and weary stretches of travel to dwell among the French
+in Algeria, or with the Jews in Tunis, or the Moslems in Cairo.  He longs
+for warmth as the Crusader longed for Jerusalem, but not short of Africa
+shall he find it.  The glacial period is coming back on Europe.
+
+The citizens of the great republic have a reputation for inordinate self-
+appreciation, but we are thinking that they undervalue many of the
+advantages their ingenuity has won.  It is admitted that they are
+restless, and must always be seeking something that they have not at
+home.  But aside from their ability to be warm in any part of their own
+country at any time of the year, where else can they travel three
+thousand miles on a stretch in a well-heated--too much heated--car,
+without change of car, without revision of tickets, without encountering
+a customhouse, without the necessity of stepping outdoors either for food
+or drink, for a library, for a bath--for any item, in short, that goes to
+the comfort of a civilized being?  And yet we are always prating of the
+superior civilization of Europe.  Nay, more, the traveler steps into a
+car--which is as comfortable as a house--in Boston, and alights from it
+only in the City of Mexico.  In what other part of the world can that
+achievement in comfort and convenience be approached?
+
+But this is not all as to climate and comfort.  We have climates of all
+sorts within easy reach, and in quantity, both good and bad, enough to
+export more in fact than we need of all sorts.  If heat is all we want,
+there are only three or four days between the zero of Maine and the
+80 deg. of Florida.  If New England is inhospitable and New York
+freezing, it is only a matter of four days to the sun and the
+exhilarating air of New Mexico and Arizona, and only five to the oranges
+and roses of that semi-tropical kingdom by the sea, Southern California.
+And if this does not content us, a day or two more lands us, without sea-
+sickness, in the land of the Aztecs, where we can live in the temperate
+or the tropic zone, eat strange fruits, and be reminded of Egypt and
+Spain and Italy, and see all the colors that the ingenuity of man has
+been able to give his skin.  Fruits and flowers and sun in the winter-
+time, a climate to lounge and be happy in--all this is within easy reach,
+with the minimum of disturbance to our daily habits.  We started out,
+when we turned our backs on the Old World, with the declaration that all
+men are free, and entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of an
+agreeable climate.  We have yet to learn, it seems, that we can indulge
+in that pursuit best on our own continent.  There is no winter climate
+elsewhere to compare with that found in our extreme Southwest or in
+Mexico, and the sooner we put this fact into poetry and literature, and
+begin to make a tradition of it, the better will it be for our peace of
+mind and for our children.  And if the continent does not satisfy us,
+there lie the West Indies within a few hours' sail, with all the
+luxuriance and geniality of the tropics.  We are only half emancipated
+yet.  We are still apt to see the world through the imagination of
+England, whose literature we adopted, or of Germany.  To these bleak
+lands Italy was a paradise, and was so sung by poets who had no
+conception of a winter without frost.  We have a winter climate of
+another sort from any in Europe; we have easy and comfortable access to
+it.  The only thing we need to do now is to correct our imagination,
+which has been led astray.  Our poets can at least do this for us by the
+help of a quasi-international copyright.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE NEW FEMININE RESERVE
+
+In times past there have been expressed desire and fear that there should
+be an American aristocracy, and the materials for its formation have been
+a good deal canvassed.  In a political point of view it is of course
+impossible, but it has been hoped by many, and feared by more, that a
+social state might be created conforming somewhat to the social order in
+European countries.  The problem has been exceedingly difficult.  An
+aristocracy of derived rank and inherited privilege being out of the
+question, and an aristocracy of talent never having succeeded anywhere,
+because enlightenment of mind tends to liberalism and democracy, there
+was only left the experiment of an aristocracy of wealth.  This does very
+well for a time, but it tends always to disintegration, and it is
+impossible to keep it exclusive.  It was found, to use the slang of the
+dry-goods shops, that it would not wash, for there were liable to crowd
+into it at any moment those who had in fact washed for a living.  An
+aristocracy has a slim tenure that cannot protect itself from this sort
+of intrusion.  We have to contrive, therefore, another basis for a class
+(to use an un-American expression), in a sort of culture or training,
+which can be perpetual, and which cannot be ordered for money, like a
+ball costume or a livery.
+
+Perhaps the "American Girl " may be the agency to bring this about.  This
+charming product of the Western world has come into great prominence of
+late years in literature and in foreign life, and has attained a
+notoriety flattering or otherwise to the national pride.  No institution
+has been better known or more marked on the Continent and in England, not
+excepting the tramway and the Pullman cars.  Her enterprise, her daring,
+her freedom from conventionality, have been the theme of the novelists
+and the horror of the dowagers having marriageable daughters.  Considered
+as "stock," the American Girl has been quoted high, and the alliances
+that she has formed with families impecunious but noble have given her
+eclat as belonging to a new and conquering race in the world.  But the
+American Girl has not simply a slender figure and a fine eye and a ready
+tongue, she is not simply an engaging and companionable person, she has
+excellent common-sense, tact, and adaptability.  She has at length seen
+in her varied European experience that it is more profitable to have
+social good form according to local standards than a reputation for dash
+and brilliancy.  Consequently the American Girl of a decade ago has
+effaced herself.  She is no longer the dazzling courageous figure.  In
+England, in France, in Germany, in Italy, she takes, as one may say, the
+color of the land.  She has retired behind her mother.  She who formerly
+marched in the van of the family procession, leading them--including the
+panting mother--a whimsical dance, is now the timid and retiring girl,
+needing the protection of a chaperon on every occasion.  The satirist
+will find no more abroad the American Girl of the old type whom he
+continues to describe.  The knowing and fascinating creature has changed
+her tactics altogether.  And the change has reacted on American society.
+The mother has come once more to the front, and even if she is obliged to
+own to forty-five years to the census-taker, she has again the position
+and the privileges of the blooming woman of thirty.  Her daughters walk
+meekly and with downcast (if still expectant) eyes, and wait for a sign.
+
+That this change is the deliberate work of the American Girl, no one who
+knows her grace and talent will deny.  In foreign travel and residence
+she has been quick to learn her lesson.  Dazzled at first by her own
+capacity and the opportunities of the foreign field, she took the
+situation by storm.  But she found too often that she had a barren
+conquest, and that the social traditions survived her success and became
+a lifelong annoyance; that is to say, it was possible to subdue foreign
+men, but the foreign women were impregnable in their social order.  The
+American Girl abroad is now, therefore, with rare exceptions, as
+carefully chaperoned and secluded as her foreign sisters.
+
+It is not necessary to lay too much stress upon this phase of American
+life abroad, but the careful observer must notice its reflex action at
+home.  The American freedom and unconventionality in the intercourse of
+the young of both sexes, which has been so much commented on as
+characteristic of American life, may not disappear, but that small
+section which calls itself "society" may attain a sort of aristocratic
+distinction by the adoption of this foreign conventionality.  It is
+sufficient now to note this tendency, and to claim the credit of it for
+the wise and intelligent American Girl.  It would be a pity if it were to
+become nationally universal, for then it would not be the aristocratic
+distinction of a few, and the American woman who longs for some sort of
+caste would be driven to some other device.
+
+It is impossible to tell yet what form this feminine reserve and
+retirement will take.  It is not at all likely to go so far as the
+Oriental seclusion of women.  The American Girl would never even
+seemingly give up her right of initiative.  If she is to stay in the
+background and pretend to surrender her choice to her parents, and with
+it all the delights of a matrimonial campaign, she will still maintain a
+position of observation.  If she seems to be influenced at present by the
+French and Italian examples, we may be sure that she is too intelligent
+and too fond of freedom to long tolerate any system of chaperonage that
+she cannot control.  She will find a way to modify the traditional
+conventionalities so as not to fetter her own free spirit.  It may be her
+mission to show the world a social order free from the forward
+independence and smartness of which she has been accused, and yet
+relieved of the dull stiffness of the older forms.  It is enough now to
+notice that a change is going on, due to the effect of foreign society
+upon American women, and to express the patriotic belief that whatever
+forms of etiquette she may bow to, the American Girl will still be on
+earth the last and best gift of God to man.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+REPOSE IN ACTIVITY
+
+What we want is repose.  We take infinite trouble and go to the ends of
+the world to get it.  That is what makes us all so restless.  If we could
+only find a spot where we could sit down, content to let the world go by,
+away from the Sunday newspapers and the chronicles of an uneasy society,
+we think we should be happy.  Perhaps such a place is Coronado Beach--
+that semi-tropical flower-garden by the sea.  Perhaps another is the
+Timeo Terrace at Taormina.  There, without moving, one has the most
+exquisite sea and shore far below him, so far that he has the feeling of
+domination without effort; the most picturesque crags and castle peaks;
+he has all classic legend under his eye without the trouble of reading,
+and mediaeval romance as well; ruins from the time of Theocritus to
+Freeman, with no responsibility of describing them; and one of the
+loveliest and most majestic of snow mountains, never twice the same in
+light and shade, entirely revealed and satisfactory from base to summit,
+with no self or otherwise imposed duty of climbing it.  Here are most of
+the elements of peace and calm spirit.  And the town itself is quite
+dead, utterly exhausted after a turbulent struggle of twenty-five hundred
+years, its poor inhabitants living along only from habit.  The only new
+things in it--the two caravansaries of the traveler--are a hotel and a
+cemetery.  One might end his days here in serene retrospection, and more
+cheaply than in other places of fewer attractions, for it is all Past and
+no Future.  Probably, therefore, it would not suit the American, whose
+imagination does not work so easily backward as forward, and who prefers
+to build his own nest rather than settle in anybody else's rookery.
+Perhaps the American deceives himself when he says he wants repose; what
+he wants is perpetual activity and change; his peace of mind is postponed
+until he can get it in his own way.  It is in feeling that he is a part
+of growth and not of decay.  Foreigners are fond of writing essays upon
+American traits and characteristics.  They touch mostly on surface
+indications.  What really distinguishes the American from all others--for
+all peoples like more or less to roam, and the English of all others are
+globe-trotters--is not so much his restlessness as his entire accord with
+the spirit of "go-ahead," the result of his absolute breaking with the
+Past.  He can repose only in the midst of intense activity.  He can sit
+down quietly in a town that is growing rapidly; but if it stands still,
+he is impelled to move his rocking-chair to one more lively.  He wants
+the world to move, and to move unencumbered; and Europe seems to him to
+carry too much baggage.  The American is simply the most modern of men,
+one who has thrown away the impedimenta of tradition.  The world never
+saw such a spectacle before, so vast a territory informed with one
+uniform spirit of energy and progress, and people tumbling into it from
+all the world, eager for the fair field and free opportunity.  The
+American delights in it; in Europe he misses the swing and "go" of the
+new life.
+
+This large explanation may not account for the summer restlessness that
+overtakes nearly everybody.  We are the annual victims of the delusion
+that there exists somewhere the ideal spot where manners are simple, and
+milk is pure, and lodging is cheap, where we shall fall at once into
+content.  We never do.  For content consists not in having all we want,
+nor, in not wanting everything, nor in being unable to get what we want,
+but in not wanting that we can get.  In our summer flittings we carry our
+wants with us to places where they cannot be gratified.  A few people
+have discovered that repose can be had at home, but this discovery is too
+unfashionable to find favor; we have no rest except in moving about.
+Looked at superficially, it seems curious that the American is, as a
+rule, the only person who does not emigrate.  The fact is that he can go
+nowhere else where life is so uneasy, and where, consequently, he would
+have so little of his sort of repose.  To put him in another country
+would be like putting a nineteenth-century man back into the eighteenth
+century.  The American wants to be at the head of the procession (as he
+fancies he is), where he can hear the band play, and be the first to see
+the fireworks of the new era.  He thinks that he occupies an advanced
+station of observation, from which his telescope can sweep the horizon
+for anything new.  And with some reason he thinks so; for not seldom he
+takes up a foreign idea and tires of it before it is current elsewhere.
+More than one great writer of England had his first popular recognition
+in America.  Even this season the Saturday Review is struggling with
+Ibsen, while Boston, having had that disease, has probably gone on to
+some other fad.
+
+Far be it from us to praise the American for his lack of repose; it is
+enough to attempt to account for it.  But from the social, or rather
+society, point of view, the subject has a disquieting aspect.  If the
+American young man and young woman get it into their heads that repose,
+especially of manner, is the correct thing, they will go in for it in a
+way to astonish the world.  The late cultivation of idiocy by the
+American dude was unique.  He carried it to an extreme impossible to the
+youth of any nation less "gifted."  And if the American girl goes in
+seriously for "repose," she will be able to give odds to any modern
+languidity or to any ancient marble.  If what is wanted in society is
+cold hauteur and languid superciliousness or lofty immobility, we are
+confident that with a little practice she can sit stiller, and look more
+impassive, and move with less motion, than any other created woman.  We
+have that confidence in her ability and adaptability.  It is a question
+whether it is worth while to do this; to sacrifice the vivacity and charm
+native to her, and the natural impulsiveness and generous gift of herself
+which belong to a new race in a new land, which is walking always towards
+the sunrise.
+
+In fine, although so much is said of the American lack of repose, is it
+not best for the American to be content to be himself, and let the
+critics adapt themselves or not, as they choose, to a new phenomenon?
+
+Let us stick a philosophic name to it, and call it repose in activity.
+The American might take the candid advice given by one friend to another,
+who complained that it was so difficult to get into the right frame of
+mind.  "The best thing you can do," he said, "is to frame your mind and
+hang it up."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WOMEN--IDEAL AND REAL
+
+We have not by any means got to the bottom of Realism.  It matters very
+little what the novelists and critics say about it--what it is and what
+it is not; the attitude of society towards it is the important thing.
+Even if the critic could prove that nature and art are the same thing,
+and that the fiction which is Real is only a copy of nature, or if
+another should prove that Reality is only to be found in the Ideal,
+little would be gained.  Literature is well enough in its place, art is
+an agreeable pastime, and it is right that society should take up either
+in seasons when lawn-tennis and polo are impracticable and afternoon teas
+become flavorless; but the question that society is or should be
+interested in is whether the young woman of the future--upon whose
+formation all our social hopes depend--is going to shape herself by a
+Realistic or an Ideal standard.  It should be said in parenthesis that
+the young woman of the passing period has inclined towards Realism in
+manner and speech, if not in dress, affecting a sort of frank return to
+the easy-going ways of nature itself, even to the adoption of the
+language of the stock exchange, the race-course, and the clubs--an
+offering of herself on the altar of good-fellowship, with the view, no
+doubt, of making life more agreeable to the opposite sex, forgetting the
+fact that men fall in love always, or used to in the days when they could
+afford that luxury, with an ideal woman, or if not with an ideal woman,
+with one whom they idealize.  And at this same time the world is full of
+doubts and questionings as to whether marriage is a failure.  Have these
+questionings anything to do with the increasing Realism of women, and a
+consequent loss of ideals?
+
+Of course the reader sees that the difficulty in considering this subject
+is whether woman is to be estimated as a work of nature or of art.  And
+here comes in the everlasting question of what is the highest beauty, and
+what is most to be desired.  The Greek artists, it seems to be well
+established, never used a model, as our artists almost invariably do, in
+their plastic and pictorial creations.  The antique Greek statues, or
+their copies, which give us the highest conceptions of feminine charm and
+manly beauty, were made after no woman, or man born of woman, but were
+creations of the ideal raised to the highest conception by the passionate
+love and long study of nature, but never by faithful copying of it.  The
+Romans copied the Greek art.  The Greek in his best days created the
+ideal figure, which we love to accept as nature.  Generation after
+generation the Greek learned to draw and learned to observe, until he was
+able to transmute his knowledge into the forms of grace and beauty which
+satisfy us as nature at her best; just as the novelist trains all his
+powers by the observation of life until he is able to transmute all the
+raw material into a creation of fiction which satisfies us.  We may be
+sure that if the Greek artist had employed the service of models in his
+studio, his art would have been merely a passing phase in human history.
+But as it is, the world has ever since been in love with his ideal woman,
+and still believes in her possibility.
+
+Now the young woman of today should not be deceived into the notion of a
+preferable Realistic development because the novelist of today gets her
+to sit to him as his model.  This may be no certain indication that she
+is either good art or good nature.  Indeed she may be quite drifting away
+from the ideal that a woman ought to aim at if we are to have a society
+that is not always tending into a realistic vulgarity and commonplace.
+It is perfectly true that a woman is her own excuse for being, and in a
+way she is doing enough for the world by simply being a woman.  It is
+difficult to rouse her to any sense of her duty as a standard of
+aspiration.  And it is difficult to explain exactly what it is that she
+is to do.  If she asks if she is expected to be a model woman, the reply
+must be that the world does not much hanker after what--is called the
+"model woman."  It seems to be more a matter of tendency than anything
+else.  Is she sagging towards Realism or rising towards Idealism?  Is she
+content to be the woman that some of the novelists, and some of the
+painters also, say she is, or would she prefer to approach that ideal
+which all the world loves?  It is a question of standards.
+
+It is natural that in these days, when the approved gospel is that it is
+better to be dead than not to be Real, society should try to approach
+nature by the way of the materialistically ignoble, and even go such a
+pace of Realism as literature finds it difficult to keep up with; but it
+is doubtful if the young woman will get around to any desirable state of
+nature by this route.  We may not be able to explain why servile
+imitation of nature degrades art and degrades woman, but both deteriorate
+without an ideal so high that there is no earthly model for it.
+Would you like to marry, perhaps, a Greek statue?  says the justly
+contemptuous critic.
+
+Not at all, at least not a Roman copy of one.  But it would be better to
+marry a woman who would rather be like a Greek statue than like some of
+these figures, without even an idea for clothing, which are lying about
+on green banks in our spring exhibitions.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ART OF IDLENESS
+
+Idleness seems to be the last accomplishment of civilization.  To be idle
+gracefully and contentedly and picturesquely is an art.  It is one in
+which the Americans, who do so many things well, do not excel.  They have
+made the excuse that they have not time, or, if they have leisure, that
+their temperament and nervous organization do not permit it.  This excuse
+will pass for a while, for we are a new people, and probably we are more
+highly and sensitively organized than any other nation--at least the
+physiologists say so; but the excuse seems more and more inadequate as we
+accumulate wealth, and consequently have leisure.  We shall not criticise
+the American colonies in Paris and Rome and Florence, and in other
+Continental places where they congregate.  They know whether they are
+restless or contented, and what examples they set to the peoples who get
+their ideas of republican simplicity and virtue from the Americans who
+sojourn among them.  They know whether with all their leisure they get
+placidity of mind and the real rest which the older nations have learned
+to enjoy.  It may not be the most desirable thing for a human being to be
+idle, but if he will be, he should be so in a creditable manner, and with
+some enjoyment to himself.  It is no slander to say that we in America
+have not yet found out the secret of this.  Perhaps we shall not until
+our energies are spent and we are in a state of decay.  At present we put
+as much energy into our pleasure as into our work, for it is inbred in us
+that laziness is a sin.  This is the Puritan idea, and it must be said
+for it that in our experience virtue and idleness are not commonly
+companions.  But this does not go to the bottom of the matter.
+
+The Italians are industrious; they are compelled to be in order to pay
+their taxes for the army and navy and get macaroni enough to live on.
+But see what a long civilization has done for them.  They have the manner
+of laziness, they have the air of leisure, they have worn off the angular
+corners of existence, and unconsciously their life is picturesque and
+enjoyable.  Those among them who have money take their pleasure simply
+and with the least expense of physical energy.  Those who have not money
+do the same thing.  This basis of existence is calm and unexaggerated;
+life is reckoned by centimes, not by dollars.  What an ideal place is
+Venice!  It is not only the most picturesque city in the world, rich in
+all that art can invent to please the eye, but how calm it is!  The
+vivacity which entertains the traveler is all on the surface.  The
+nobleman in his palace if there be any palace that is not turned into a
+hotel, or a magazine of curiosities, or a municipal office--can live on a
+diet that would make an American workman strike, simply because he has
+learned to float through life; and the laborer is equally happy on little
+because he has learned to wait without much labor.  The gliding, easy
+motion of the gondola expresses the whole situation; and the gondolier
+who with consummate skill urges his dreamy bark amid the throng and in
+the tortuous canals for an hour or two, and then sleeps in the sun, is a
+type of that rest in labor which we do not attain.  What happiness there
+is in a dish of polenta, or of a few fried fish, in a cup of coffee, and
+in one of those apologies for cigars which the government furnishes, dear
+at a cent--the cigar with a straw in it, as if it were a julep, which it
+needs five minutes to ignite, and then will furnish occupation for a
+whole evening!  Is it a hard lot, that of the fishermen and the mariners
+of the Adriatic?  The lights are burning all night long in a caf‚ on the
+Riva del Schiavoni, and the sailors and idlers of the shore sit there
+jabbering and singing.  and trying their voices in lusty hallooing till
+the morning light begins to make the lagoon opalescent.  The traveler who
+lodges near cannot sleep, but no more can the sailors, who steal away in
+the dawn, wafted by painted sails.  In the heat of the day, when the fish
+will not bite, comes the siesta.  Why should the royal night be wasted in
+slumber?  The shore of the Riva, the Grand Canal, the islands, gleam with
+twinkling lamps; the dark boats glide along with a star in the prow,
+bearing youth and beauty and sin and ugliness, all alike softened by the
+shadows; the electric lights from the shores and the huge steamers shoot
+gleams on towers and facades; the moon wades among the fleecy clouds;
+here and there a barge with colored globes of light carries a band of
+singing men and women and players on the mandolin and the fiddle, and
+from every side the songs of Italy, pathetic in their worn gayety, float
+to the entranced ears of those who lean from balconies, or lounge in
+gondolas and listen with hearts made a little heavy and wistful with so
+much beauty.
+
+Can any one float in such scenes and be so contentedly idle anywhere in
+our happy land?  Have we learned yet the simple art of easy enjoyment?
+Can we buy it with money quickly, or is it a grace that comes only with
+long civilization?  Italy, for instance, is full of accumulated wealth,
+of art, even of ostentation and display, and the new generation probably
+have lost the power to conceive, if not the skill to execute, the great
+works which excite our admiration.  Nothing can be much more meretricious
+than its modern art, when anything is produced that is not an exact copy
+of something created when there was genius there.  But in one respect the
+Italians have entered into the fruits of the ages of trial and of
+failure, and that, is the capacity of being idle with much money or with
+none, and getting day by day their pay for the bother of living in this
+world.  It seems a difficult lesson for us to learn in country or city.
+Alas!  when we have learned it shall we not want to emigrate, as so many
+of the Italians do?  Some philosophers say that men were not created to
+be happy.  Perhaps they were not intended to be idle.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+IS THERE ANY CONVERSATION
+
+Is there any such thing as conversation?  It is a delicate subject to
+touch, because many people understand conversation to be talk; not the
+exchange of ideas, but of words; and we would not like to say anything to
+increase the flow of the latter.  We read of times and salons in which
+real conversation existed, held by men and women.  Are they altogether in
+the past?  We believe that men do sometimes converse.  Do women ever?
+Perhaps so.  In those hours sacred to the relaxation of undress and the
+back hair, in the upper penetralia of the household, where two or three
+or six are gathered together on and about the cushioned frame intended
+for repose, do they converse, or indulge in that sort of chat from which
+not one idea is carried away?  No one reports, fortunately, and we do not
+know.  But do all the women like this method of spending hour after hour,
+day after day-indeed, a lifetime?  Is it invigorating, even restful?
+Think of the talk this past summer, the rivers and oceans of it, on
+piazzas and galleries in the warm evenings or the fresher mornings, in
+private houses, on hotel verandas, in the shade of thousands of cottages
+by the sea and in the hills!  As you recall it, what was it all about?
+Was the mind in a vapid condition after an evening of it?  And there is
+so much to read, and so much to think about, and the world is so
+interesting, if you do think about it, and nearly every person has some
+peculiarity of mind that would be worth study if you could only get at
+it!  It is really, we repeat, such an interesting world, and most people
+get so little out of it.  Now there is the conversation of hens, when the
+hens are busy and not self-conscious; there is something fascinating
+about it, because the imagination may invest it with a recondite and
+spicy meaning; but the common talk of people!  We infer sometimes that
+the hens are not saying anything, because they do not read, and
+consequently their minds are empty.  And perhaps we are right.  As to
+conversation, there is no use in sending the bucket into the well when
+the well is dry--it only makes a rattling of windlass and chain.
+We do not wish to be understood to be an enemy of the light traffic of
+human speech.  Deliver us from the didactic and the everlastingly
+improving style of thing!  Conversation, in order to be good, and
+intellectually inspiring, and spiritually restful, need not always be
+serious.  It must be alert and intelligent, and mean more by its
+suggestions and allusions than is said.  There is the light touch-and-go
+play about topics more or less profound that is as agreeable as heat-
+lightning in a sultry evening.  Why may not a person express the whims
+and vagaries of a lambent mind (if he can get a lambent mind) without
+being hauled up short for it, and plunged into a heated dispute?  In the
+freedom of real conversation the mind throws out half-thoughts,
+paradoxes, for which a man is not to be held strictly responsible to the
+very roots of his being, and which need to be caught up and played with
+in the same tentative spirit.  The dispute and the hot argument are
+usually the bane of conversation and the death of originality.  We like
+to express a notion, a fancy, without being called upon to defend it,
+then and there, in all its possible consequences, as if it were to be an
+article in a creed or a plank in a platform.  Must we be always either
+vapid or serious?
+
+We have been obliged to take notice of the extraordinary tendency of
+American women to cultivation, to the improvement of the mind, by means
+of reading, clubs, and other intellectual exercises, and to acknowledge
+that they are leaving the men behind; that is, the men not in the so-
+called professions.  Is this intellectualization beginning to show in the
+conversation of women when they are together, say in the hours of
+relaxation in the penetralia spoken of, or in general society?  Is there
+less talk about the fashion of dress, and the dearness or cheapness of
+materials, and about servants, and the ways of the inchoate citizen
+called the baby, and the infinitely little details of the private life of
+other people?  Is it true that if a group of men are talking, say about
+politics, or robust business, or literature, and they are joined by women
+(whose company is always welcome), the conversation is pretty sure to
+take a lower mental plane, to become more personal, more frivolous,
+accommodating itself to quite a different range?  Do the well-read,
+thoughtful women, however beautiful and brilliant and capable of the
+gayest persiflage, prefer to talk with men, to listen to the conversation
+of men, rather than to converse with or listen to their own sex?  If this
+is true, why is it?  Women, as a rule, in "society" at any rate, have
+more leisure than men.  In the facilities and felicities of speech they
+commonly excel men, and usually they have more of that vivacious dramatic
+power which is called "setting out a thing to the life."  With all these
+advantages, and all the world open to them in newspapers and in books,
+they ought to be the leaders and stimulators of the best conversation.
+With them it should never drop down to the too-common flatness and
+banality.  Women have made this world one of the most beautiful places of
+residence to be conceived.  They might make it one of the most
+interesting.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE TALL GIRL
+
+It is the fashion for girls to be tall.  This is much more than saying
+that tall girls are the fashion.  It means not only that the tall girl
+has come in, but that girls are tall, and are becoming tall, because it
+is the fashion, and because there is a demand for that sort of girl.
+There is no hint of stoutness, indeed the willowy pattern is preferred,
+but neither is leanness suggested; the women of the period have got hold
+of the poet's idea, "tall and most divinely fair," and are living up to
+it.  Perhaps this change in fashion is more noticeable in England and on
+the Continent than in America, but that may be because there is less room
+for change in America, our girls being always of an aspiring turn.  Very
+marked the phenomenon is in England; on the street, at any concert or
+reception, the number of tall girls is so large as to occasion remark,
+especially among the young girls just coming into the conspicuousness of
+womanhood.  The tendency of the new generation is towards unusual height
+and gracious slimness.  The situation would be embarrassing to thousands
+of men who have been too busy to think about growing upward, were it not
+for the fact that the tall girl, who must be looked up to, is almost
+invariably benignant, and bears her height with a sweet timidity that
+disarms fear.  Besides, the tall girl has now come on in such force that
+confidence is infused into the growing army, and there is a sense of
+support in this survival of the tallest that is very encouraging to the
+young.
+
+Many theories have been put forward to account for this phenomenon.  It
+is known that delicate plants in dark places struggle up towards the
+light in a frail slenderness, and it is said that in England, which seems
+to have increasing cloudiness, and in the capital more and more months of
+deeper darkness and blackness, it is natural that the British girl should
+grow towards the light.  But this is a fanciful view of the case, for it
+cannot be proved that English men have proportionally increased their
+stature.  The English man has always seemed big to the Continental
+peoples, partly because objects generally take on gigantic dimensions
+when seen through a fog.  Another theory, which has much more to commend
+it, is that the increased height of women is due to the aesthetic
+movement, which has now spent its force, but has left certain results,
+especially in the change of the taste in colors.  The woman of the
+aesthetic artist was nearly always tall, usually willowy, not to say
+undulating and serpentine.  These forms of feminine loveliness and
+commanding height have been for many years before the eyes of the women
+of England in paintings and drawings, and it is unavoidable that this
+pattern should not have its effect upon the new and plastic generation.
+Never has there been another generation so open to new ideas; and if the
+ideal of womanhood held up was that of length and gracious slenderness,
+it would be very odd if women should not aspire to it.  We know very well
+the influence that the heroines of the novelists have had from time to
+time upon the women of a given period.  The heroine of Scott was, no
+doubt, once common in society--the delicate creature who promptly fainted
+on the reminiscence of the scent of a rose, but could stand any amount of
+dragging by the hair through underground passages, and midnight rides on
+lonely moors behind mailed and black-mantled knights, and a run or two of
+hair-removing typhoid fever, and come out at the end of the story as
+fresh as a daisy.  She could not be found now, so changed are the
+requirements of fiction.  We may assume, too, that the full-blown
+aesthetic girl of that recent period--the girl all soul and faded
+harmonies--would be hard to find, but the fascination of the height and
+slenderness of that girl remains something more than a tradition, and is,
+no doubt, to some extent copied by the maiden just coming into her
+kingdom.
+
+Those who would belittle this matter may say that the appearance of which
+we speak is due largely to the fashion of dress--the long unbroken lines
+which add to the height and encourage the appearance of slenderness.  But
+this argument gives away the case.  Why do women wear the present
+fascinating gowns, in which the lithe figure is suggested in all its
+womanly dignity?  In order that they may appear to be tall.  That is to
+say, because it is the fashion to be tall; women born in the mode are
+tall, and those caught in a hereditary shortness endeavor to conform to
+the stature of the come and coming woman.
+
+There is another theory, that must be put forward with some hesitation,
+for the so-called emancipation of woman is a delicate subject to deal
+with, for while all the sex doubtless feel the impulse of the new time,
+there are still many who indignantly reject the implication in the
+struggle for the rights of women.  To say, therefore, that women are
+becoming tall as a part of their outfit for taking the place of men in
+this world would be to many an affront, so that this theory can only be
+suggested.  Yet probably physiology would bear us out in saying that the
+truly emancipated woman, taking at last the place in affairs which men
+have flown in the face of Providence by denying her, would be likely to
+expand physically as well as mentally, and that as she is beginning to
+look down upon man intellectually, she is likely to have a corresponding
+physical standard.
+
+Seriously, however, none of these theories are altogether satisfactory,
+and we are inclined to seek, as is best in all cases, the simplest
+explanation.  Women are tall and becoming tall simply because it is the
+fashion, and that statement never needs nor is capable of any
+explanation.  Awhile ago it was the fashion to be petite and arch; it is
+now the fashion to be tall and gracious, and nothing more can be said
+about it.  Of course the reader, who is usually inclined to find the
+facetious side of any grave topic, has already thought of the application
+of the self-denying hymn, that man wants but little here below, and wants
+that little long; but this may be only a passing sigh of the period.  We
+are far from expressing any preference for tall women over short women.
+There are creative moods of the fancy when each seems the better.  We can
+only chronicle, but never create.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DEADLY DIARY
+
+Many people regard the keeping of a diary as a meritorious occupation.
+The young are urged to take up this cross; it is supposed to benefit
+girls especially.  Whether women should do it is to some minds not an
+open question, although there is on record the case of the Frenchman who
+tried to shoot himself when he heard that his wife was keeping a diary.
+This intention of suicide may have arisen from the fear that his wife was
+keeping a record of his own peccadilloes rather than of her own thoughts
+and emotions.  Or it may have been from the fear that she was putting
+down those little conjugal remarks which the husband always dislikes to
+have thrown up to him, and which a woman can usually quote accurately, it
+may be for years, it may be forever, without the help of a diary.  So we
+can appreciate without approving the terror of the Frenchman at living on
+and on in the same house with a growing diary.  For it is not simply that
+this little book of judgment is there in black and white, but that the
+maker of it is increasing her power of minute observation and analytic
+expression.  In discussing the question whether a woman should keep a
+diary it is understood that it is not a mere memorandum of events and
+engagements, such as both men and women of business and affairs
+necessarily keep, but the daily record which sets down feelings,
+emotions, and impressions, and criticises people and records opinions.
+But this is a question that applies to men as well as to women.
+
+It has been assumed that the diary serves two good purposes: it is a
+disciplinary exercise for the keeper of it, and perhaps a moral guide;
+and it has great historical value.  As to the first, it may be helpful to
+order, method, discipline, and it may be an indulgence of spleen, whims,
+and unwholesome criticism and conceit.  The habit of saying right out
+what you think of everybody is not a good one, and the record of such
+opinions and impressions, while it is not so mischievous to the public as
+talking may be, is harmful to the recorder.  And when we come to the
+historical value of the diary, we confess to a growing suspicion of it.
+It is such a deadly weapon when it comes to light after the passage of
+years.  It has an authority which the spoken words of its keeper never
+had.  It is 'ex parte', and it cannot be cross-examined.  The supposition
+is that being contemporaneous with the events spoken of, it must be true,
+and that it is an honest record.  Now, as a matter of fact, we doubt if
+people are any more honest as to themselves or others in a diary than out
+of it; and rumors, reported facts, and impressions set down daily in the
+heat and haste of the prejudicial hour are about as likely to be wrong as
+right.  Two diaries of the same events rarely agree.  And in turning over
+an old diary we never know what to allow for the personal equation.  The
+diary is greatly relied on by the writers of history, but it is doubtful
+if there is any such liar in the world, even when the keeper of it is
+honest.  It is certain to be partisan, and more liable to be misinformed
+than a newspaper, which exercises some care in view of immediate
+publicity.  The writer happens to know of two diaries which record, on
+the testimony of eye-witnesses, the circumstances of the last hours of
+Garfield, and they differ utterly in essential particulars.  One of these
+may turn up fifty years from now, and be accepted as true.  An infinite
+amount of gossip goes into diaries about men and women that would not
+stand the test of a moment's contemporary publication.  But by-and-by it
+may all be used to smirch or brighten unjustly some one's character.
+Suppose a man in the Army of the Potomac had recorded daily all his
+opinions of men and events.  Reading it over now, with more light and a
+juster knowledge of character and of measures, is it not probable that he
+would find it a tissue of misconceptions?  Few things are actually what
+they seem today; they are colored both by misapprehensions and by moods.
+If a man writes a letter or makes report of an occurrence for immediate
+publication, subject to universal criticism, there is some restraint on
+him.  In his private letter, or diary especially, he is apt to set down
+what comes into his head at the moment, often without much effort at
+verification.
+
+We have been led to this disquisition into the fundamental nature of this
+private record by the question put to us, whether it is a good plan for a
+woman to keep a diary.  Speaking generally, the diary has become a sort
+of fetich, the authority of which ought to be overthrown.  It is fearful
+to think how our characters are probably being lied away by innumerable
+pen scratches in secret repositories, which may some day come to light as
+unimpeachable witnesses.  The reader knows that he is not the sort of man
+which the diarist jotted him down to be in a single interview.  The diary
+may be a good thing for self-education, if the keeper could insure its
+destruction.  The mental habit of diarizing may have some value, even
+when it sets undue importance upon trifles.  We confess that, never
+having seen a woman's private diary (except those that have been
+published), we do not share the popular impression as to their tenuity
+implied in the question put to us.  Taking it for granted that they are
+full of noble thoughts and beautiful imaginings, we doubt whether the
+time spent on them could not be better employed in acquiring knowledge or
+taking exercise.  For the diary forgotten and left to the next generation
+may be as dangerous as dynamite.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WHISTLING GIRL
+
+The wisdom of our ancestors packed away in proverbial sayings may always
+be a little suspected.  We have a vague respect for a popular proverb, as
+embodying folk-experience, and expressing not the wit of one, but the
+common thought of a race.  We accept the saying unquestioning, as a sort
+of inspiration out of the air, true because nobody has challenged it for
+ages, and probably for the same reason that we try to see the new moon
+over our left shoulder.  Very likely the musty saying was the product of
+the average ignorance of an unenlightened time, and ought not to have the
+respect of a scientific and traveled people.  In fact it will be found
+that a large proportion of the proverbial sayings which we glibly use are
+fallacies based on a very limited experience of the world, and probably
+were set afloat by the idiocy or prejudice of one person.  To examine one
+of them is enough for our present purpose.
+
+          "Whistling girls and crowing hens
+          Always come to some bad ends."
+
+It would be interesting to know the origin of this proverb, because it is
+still much relied on as evincing a deep knowledge of human nature, and as
+an argument against change, that is to say, in this case, against
+progress.  It would seem to have been made by a man, conservative,
+perhaps malevolent, who had no appreciation of a hen, and a
+conservatively poor opinion of woman.  His idea was to keep woman in her
+place--a good idea when not carried too far--but he did not know what her
+place is, and he wanted to put a sort of restraint upon her emancipation
+by coupling her with an emancipated hen.  He therefore launched this
+shaft of ridicule, and got it to pass as an arrow of wisdom shot out of a
+popular experience in remote ages.
+
+In the first place, it is not true, and probably never was true even when
+hens were at their lowest.  We doubts its Sanscrit antiquity.  It is
+perhaps of Puritan origin, and rhymed in New England.  It is false as to
+the hen.  A crowing hen was always an object of interest and distinction;
+she was pointed out to visitors; the owner was proud of her
+accomplishment, he was naturally likely to preserve her life, and
+especially if she could lay.  A hen that can lay and crow is a 'rara
+avis'.  And it should be parenthetically said here that the hen who can
+crow and cannot lay is not a good example for woman.  The crowing hen was
+of more value than the silent hen, provided she crowed with discretion;
+and she was likely to be a favorite, and not at all to come to some bad
+end.  Except, indeed, where the proverb tended to work its own
+fulfillment.  And this is the regrettable side of most proverbs of an
+ill-nature, that they do help to work the evil they predict.  Some
+foolish boy, who had heard this proverb, and was sent out to the hen-coop
+in the evening to slay for the Thanksgiving feast, thought he was a
+justifiable little providence in wringing the neck of the crowing hen,
+because it was proper (according to the saying) that she should come to
+some bad end.  And as years went on, and that kind of boy increased and
+got to be a man, it became a fixed idea to kill the amusing, interesting,
+spirited, emancipated hen, and naturally the barn-yard became tamer and
+tamer, the production of crowing hens was discouraged (the wise old hens
+laid no eggs with a crow in them, according to the well-known principle
+of heredity), and the man who had in his youth exterminated the hen of
+progress actually went about quoting that false couplet as an argument
+against the higher education of woman.
+
+As a matter of fact, also, the couplet is not true about woman; whether
+it ought to be true is an ethical question that will not be considered
+here.  The whistling girl does not commonly come to a bad end.  Quite as
+often as any other girl she learns to whistle a cradle song, low and
+sweet and charming, to the young voter in the cradle.  She is a girl of
+spirit, of independence of character, of dash and flavor; and as to lips,
+why, you must have some sort of presentable lips to whistle; thin ones
+will not.  The whistling girl does not come to a bad end at all (if
+marriage is still considered a good occupation), except a cloud may be
+thrown upon her exuberant young life by this rascally proverb.  Even if
+she walks the lonely road of life, she has this advantage, that she can
+whistle to keep her courage up.  But in a larger sense, one that this
+practical age can understand, it is not true that the whistling girl
+comes to a bad end.  Whistling pays.  It has brought her money; it has
+blown her name about the listening world.  Scarcely has a non-whistling
+woman been more famous.  She has set aside the adage.  She has done so
+much towards the emancipation of her sex from the prejudice created by an
+ill-natured proverb which never had root in fact.
+
+But has the whistling woman come to stay?  Is it well for woman to
+whistle?  Are the majority of women likely to be whistlers?  These are
+serious questions, not to be taken up in a light manner at the end of a
+grave paper.  Will woman ever learn to throw a stone?  There it is.  The
+future is inscrutable.  We only know that whereas they did not whistle
+with approval, now they do; the prejudice of generations gradually melts
+away.  And woman's destiny is not linked with that of the hen, nor to be
+controlled by a proverb--perhaps not by anything.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BORN OLD AND RICH
+
+We have been remiss in not proposing a remedy for our present social and
+economic condition.  Looking backward, we see this.  The scheme may not
+be practical, any more than the Utopian plans that have been put forward,
+but it is radical and interesting, and requires, as the other schemes do,
+a total change in human nature (which may be a good thing to bring
+about), and a general recasting of the conditions of life.  This is and
+should be no objection to a socialistic scheme.  Surface measures will
+not avail.  The suggestion for a minor alleviation of inequality, which
+seems to have been acted on, namely, that women should propose, has not
+had the desired effect if it is true, as reported, that the eligible
+young men are taking to the woods.  The workings of such a measure are as
+impossible to predict in advance as the operation of the McKinley tariff.
+It might be well to legislate that people should be born equal (including
+equal privileges of the sexes), but the practical difficulty is to keep
+them equal.  Life is wrong somehow.  Some are born rich and some are born
+poor, and this inequality makes misery, and then some lose their
+possessions, which others get hold of, and that makes more misery.  We
+can put our fingers on the two great evils of life as it now is: the
+first is poverty; and the second is infirmity, which is the accompaniment
+of increasing years.  Poverty, which is only the unequal distribution of
+things desired, makes strife, and is the opportunity of lawyers; and
+infirmity is the excuse for doctors.  Think what the world would be
+without lawyers and doctors!
+
+We are all born young, and most of us are born poor.  Youth is
+delightful, but we are always getting away from it.  How different it
+would be if we were always going towards it!  Poverty is unpleasant, and
+the great struggle of life is to get rid of it; but it is the common
+fortune that in proportion as wealth is attained the capacity of enjoying
+it departs.  It seems, therefore, that our life is wrong end first.  The
+remedy suggested is that men should be born rich and old.  Instead of the
+necessity of making a fortune, which is of less and less value as death
+approaches, we should have only the privilege of spending it, and it
+would have its natural end in the cradle, in which we should be rocked
+into eternal sleep.  Born old, one would, of course, inherit experience,
+so that wealth could be made to contribute to happiness, and each day,
+instead of lessening the natural powers and increasing infirmities, would
+bring new vigor and capacity of enjoyment.  It would be going from winter
+to autumn, from autumn to summer, from summer to spring.  The joy of a
+life without care as to ways and means, and every morning refitted with
+the pulsations of increasing youth, it is almost impossible to imagine.
+Of course this scheme has difficulties on the face of it.  The allotting
+of the measure of wealth would not be difficult to the socialists,
+because they would insist that every person should be born with an equal
+amount of property.  What this should be would depend upon the length of
+life; and how should this be arrived at?  The insurance companies might
+agree, but no one else would admit that he belongs in the average.
+Naturally the Biblical limit of threescore and ten suggests itself; but
+human nature is very queer.  With the plain fact before them that the
+average life of man is less than thirty-four years, few would be willing,
+if the choice were offered, to compromise on seventy.  Everybody has a
+hope of going beyond that, so that if seventy were proposed as the year
+at birth, there would no doubt be as much dissatisfaction as there is at
+the present loose arrangement.  Science would step in, and demonstrate
+that there is no reason why, with proper care of the system, it should
+not run a hundred years.  It is improbable, then, that the majority could
+be induced to vote for the limit of seventy years, or to exchange the
+exciting uncertainty of adding a little to the period which must be
+accompanied by the weight of the grasshopper, for the certainty of only
+seventy years in this much-abused world.
+
+But suppose a limit to be agreed on, and the rich old man and the rich
+old woman (never now too old to marry) to start on their career towards
+youth and poverty.  The imagination kindles at the idea.  The money would
+hold out just as long as life lasted, and though it would all be going
+downhill, as it were, what a charming descent, without struggle, and with
+only the lessening infirmities that belong to decreasing age!  There
+would be no second childhood, only the innocence and elasticity of the
+first.  It all seems very fair, but we must not forget that this is a
+mortal world, and that it is liable to various accidents.  Who, for
+instance, could be sure that he would grow young gracefully?  There would
+be the constant need of fighting the hot tempers and impulses of youth,
+growing more and more instead of less and less unreasonable.  And then,
+how many would reach youth?  More than half, of course, would be cut off
+in their prime, and be more and more liable to go as they fell back into
+the pitfalls and errors of childhood.  Would people grow young together
+even as harmoniously as they grow old together?  It would be a pretty
+sight, that of the few who descended into the cradle together, but this
+inversion of life would not escape the woes of mortality.  And there are
+other considerations, unless it should turn out that a universal tax on
+land should absolutely change human nature.  There are some who would be
+as idle and spendthrift going towards youth as they now are going away
+from it, and perhaps more, so that half the race on coming to immaturity
+would be in child asylums.  And then others who would be stingy and
+greedy and avaricious, and not properly spend their allotted fortune.
+And we should have the anomaly, which is so distasteful to the reformer
+now, of rich babies.  A few babies inordinately rich, and the rest in
+asylums.
+
+Still, the plan has more to recommend it than most others for removing
+poverty and equalizing conditions.  We should all start rich, and the
+dying off of those who would never attain youth would amply provide
+fortunes for those born old.  Crime would be less also; for while there
+would, doubtless, be some old sinners, the criminal class, which is very
+largely under thirty, would be much smaller than it is now.  Juvenile
+depravity would proportionally disappear, as not more people would reach
+non-age than now reach over-age.  And the great advantage of the scheme,
+one that would indeed transform the world, is that women would always be
+growing younger.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE "OLD SOLDIER"
+
+The "old soldier" is beginning to outline himself upon the public mind as
+a distant character in American life.  Literature has not yet got hold of
+him, and perhaps his evolution is not far enough advanced to make him as
+serviceable as the soldier of the Republic and the Empire, the relic of
+the Old Guard, was to Hugo and Balzac, the trooper of Italy and Egypt,
+the maimed hero of Borodino and Waterloo, who expected again the coming
+of the Little Corporal.  It takes time to develop a character, and to
+throw the glamour of romance over what may be essentially commonplace.  A
+quarter of a century has not sufficed to separate the great body of the
+surviving volunteers in the war for the Union from the body of American
+citizens, notwithstanding the organization of the Grand Army of the
+Republic, the encampments, the annual reunions, and the distinction of
+pensions, and the segregation in Soldiers' Homes.  The "old soldier"
+slowly eliminates himself from the mass, and begins to take, and to make
+us take, a romantic view of his career.  There was one event in his life,
+and his personality in it looms larger and larger as he recedes from it.
+The heroic sacrifice of it does not diminish, as it should not, in our
+estimation, and he helps us to keep glowing a lively sense of it.  The
+past centres about him and his great achievement, and the whole of life
+is seen in the light of it.  In his retreat in the Home, and in his
+wandering from one Home to another, he ruminates on it, he talks of it;
+he separates himself from the rest of mankind by a broad distinction, and
+his point of view of life becomes as original as it is interesting.  In
+the Homes the battered veterans speak mainly of one thing; and in the
+monotony of their spent lives develop whimseys and rights and wrongs,
+patriotic ardors and criticisms on their singular fate, which are
+original in their character in our society.  It is in human nature to
+like rest but not restriction, bounty but not charity, and the tired
+heroes of the war grow restless, though every physical want is supplied.
+They have a fancy that they would like to see again the homes of their
+youth, the farmhouse in the hills, the cottage in the river valley, the
+lonesome house on the wide prairie, the street that ran down to the wharf
+where the fishing-smacks lay, to see again the friends whom they left
+there, and perhaps to take up the occupations that were laid down when
+they seized the musket in 1861.  Alas! it is not their home anymore; the
+friends are no longer there; and what chance is there of occupation for a
+man who is now feeble in body and who has the habit of campaigning?  This
+generation has passed on to other things.  It looks upon the hero as an
+illustration in the story of the war, which it reads like history.  The
+veteran starts out from the shelter of the Home.  One evening, towards
+sunset, the comfortable citizen, taking the mild air on his piazza, sees
+an interesting figure approach.  Its dress is half military, half that of
+the wanderer whose attention to his personal appearance is only
+spasmodic.
+
+The veteran gives the military salute, he holds himself erect, almost too
+erect, and his speech is voluble and florid.  It is a delightful evening;
+it seems to be a good growing-time; the country looks prosperous.  He is
+sorry to be any trouble or interruption, but the fact is--yes, he is on
+his way to his old home in Vermont; it seems like he would like to taste
+some home cooking again, and sit in the old orchard, and perhaps lay his
+bones, what is left of them, in the burying-ground on the hill.  He pulls
+out his well-worn papers as he talks; there is the honorable discharge,
+the permit of the Home, and the pension.  Yes, Uncle Sam is generous; it
+is the most generous government God ever made, and he would willingly
+fight for it again.  Thirty dollars a month, that is what he has; he is
+not a beggar; he wants for nothing.  But the pension is not payable till
+the end of the month.  It is entirely his own obligation, his own fault;
+he can fight, but he cannot lie, and nobody is to blame but himself; but
+last night he fell in with some old comrades at Southdown, and, well, you
+know how it is.  He had plenty of money when he left the Home, and he is
+not asking for anything now, but if he had a few dollars for his railroad
+fare to the next city, he could walk the rest of the way.  Wounded?
+Well, if I stood out here against the light you could just see through
+me, that's all.  Bullets?  It's no use to try to get 'em out.  But, sir,
+I'm not complaining.  It had to be done; the country had to be saved; and
+I'd do it again if it were necessary.  Had any hot fights?  Sir, I was at
+Gettysburg!  The veteran straightens up, and his eyes flash as if he saw
+again that sanguinary field.  Off goes the citizen's hat.  Children, come
+out here; here is one of the soldiers of Gettysburg!  Yes, sir; and this
+knee--you see I can't bend it much--got stiffened at Chickamauga; and
+this scratch here in the neck was from a bullet at Gaines Mill; and this
+here, sir--thumping his chest--you notice I don't dare to cough much--
+after the explosion of a shell at Petersburg I found myself lying on
+my-back, and the only one of my squad who was not killed outright.  Was
+it the imagination of the citizen or of the soldier that gave the
+impression that the hero had been in the forefront of every important
+action of the war?  Well, it doesn't matter much.  The citizen was
+sitting there under his own vine, the comfortable citizen of a free
+republic, because of the wounds in this cheerful and imaginative old
+wanderer.  There, that is enough, sir, quite enough.  I am no beggar.
+I thought perhaps you had heard of the Ninth Vermont.  Woods is my name
+--Sergeant Woods.  I trust some time, sir, I shall be in a position to
+return the compliment.  Good-evening, sir; God bless your honor! and
+accept the blessing of an old soldier.  And the dear old hero goes down
+the darkening avenue, not so steady of bearing as when he withstood the
+charge of Pickett on Cemetery Hill, and with the independence of the
+American citizen who deserves well of his country, makes his way to the
+nearest hospitable tavern.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE ISLAND OF BIMINI
+
+To the northward of Hispaniola lies the island of Bimini.  It may not be
+one of the spice islands, but it grows the best ginger to be found in the
+world.  In it is a fair city, and beside the city a lofty mountain, at
+the foot of which is a noble spring called the 'Fons Juventutis'.  This
+fountain has a sweet savor, as of all manner of spicery, and every hour
+of the day the water changes its savor and its smell.  Whoever drinks of
+this well will be healed of whatever malady he has, and will seem always
+young.  It is not reported that women and men who drink of this fountain
+will be always young, but that they will seem so, and probably to
+themselves, which simply means, in our modern accuracy of language, that
+they will feel young.  This island has never been found.  Many voyages
+have been made in search of it in ships and in the imagination, and Liars
+have said they have landed on it and drunk of the water, but they never
+could guide any one else thither.  In the credulous centuries when these
+voyages were made, other islands were discovered, and a continent much
+more important than Bimini; but these discoveries were a disappointment,
+because they were not what the adventurers wanted.  They did not
+understand that they had found a new land in which the world should renew
+its youth and begin a new career.  In time the quest was given up, and
+men regarded it as one of the delusions which came to an end in the
+sixteenth century.  In our day no one has tried to reach Bimini except
+Heine.  Our scientific period has a proper contempt for all such
+superstitions.  We now know that the 'Fons Juventutis' is in every man,
+and that if actually juvenility cannot be renewed, the advance of age can
+be arrested and the waste of tissues be prevented, and an uncalculated
+length of earthly existence be secured, by the injection of some sort of
+fluid into the system.  The right fluid has not yet been discovered by
+science, but millions of people thought that it had the other day, and
+now confidently expect it.  This credulity has a scientific basis, and
+has no relation to the old absurd belief in Bimini.  We thank goodness
+that we do not live in a credulous age.
+
+The world would be in a poor case indeed if it had not always before it
+some ideal or millennial condition, some panacea, some transmutation of
+base metals into gold, some philosopher's stone, some fountain of youth,
+some process of turning charcoal into diamonds, some scheme for
+eliminating evil.  But it is worth mentioning that in the historical
+evolution we have always got better things than we sought or imagined,
+developments on a much grander scale.  History is strewn with the wreck
+of popular delusions, but always in place of them have come realizations
+more astonishing than the wildest fancies of the dreamers.  Florida was a
+disappointment as a Bimini, so were the land of the Ohio, the land of the
+Mississippi, the Dorado of the Pacific coast.  But as the illusions,
+pushed always westward, vanished in the light of common day, lo! a
+continent gradually emerged, with millions of people animated by
+conquering ambition of progress in freedom; an industrial continent,
+covered with a network of steel, heated by steam, and lighted by
+electricity.  What a spectacle of youth on a grand scale is this!
+Christopher Columbus had not the slightest conception of what he was
+doing when he touched the button.  But we are not satisfied.  Quite as
+far from being so as ever.  The popular imagination runs a hard race with
+any possible natural development.  Being in possession of so much, we now
+expect to travel in the air, to read news in the sending mind before it
+is sent, to create force without cost, to be transported without time,
+and to make everybody equal in fortune and happiness to everybody else by
+act of Congress.  Such confidence have we in the power of a "resolution"
+of the people and by the people that it seems feasible to make women into
+men, oblivious of the more important and imperative task that will then
+arise of making men into women.  Some of these expectations are only
+Biminis of the present, but when they have vanished there will be a
+social and industrial world quite beyond our present conceptions, no
+doubt.  In the article of woman, for instance, she may not become the
+being that the convention expects, but there may appear a Woman of whom
+all the Aspasias and Helens were only the faintest types.  And although
+no progress will take the conceit out of men, there may appear a Man so
+amenable to ordinary reason that he will give up the notion that he can
+lift himself up by his bootstraps, or make one grain of wheat two by
+calling it two.
+
+One of the Biminis that have always been looked for is an American
+Literature.  There was an impression that there must be such a thing
+somewhere on a continent that has everything else.  We gave the world
+tobacco and the potato, perhaps the most important contributions to the
+content and the fatness of the world made by any new country, and it was
+a noble ambition to give it new styles of art and literature also.  There
+seems to have been an impression that a literature was something
+indigenous or ready-made, like any other purely native product, not
+needing any special period of cultivation or development, and that a
+nation would be in a mortifying position without one, even before it
+staked out its cities or built any roads.  Captain John Smith, if he had
+ever settled here and spread himself over the continent, as he was
+capable of doing, might have taken the contract to furnish one, and we
+may be sure that he would have left us nothing to desire in that
+direction.  But the vein of romance he opened was not followed up.  Other
+prospectings were made.  Holes, so to speak, were dug in New England, and
+in the middle South, and along the frontier, and such leads were found
+that again and again the certainty arose that at last the real American
+ore had been discovered.  Meantime a certain process called civilization
+went on, and certain ideas of breadth entered into our conceptions, and
+ideas also of the historical development of the expression of thought in
+the world, and with these a comprehension of what American really is, and
+the difficulty of putting the contents of a bushel measure into a pint
+cup.  So, while we have been expecting the American Literature to come
+out from some locality, neat and clean, like a nugget, or, to change the
+figure, to bloom any day like a century-plant, in one striking, fragrant
+expression of American life, behold something else has been preparing and
+maturing, larger and more promising than our early anticipations.  In
+history, in biography, in science, in the essay, in the novel and story,
+there are coming forth a hundred expressions of the hundred aspects of
+American life; and they are also sung by the poets in notes as varied as
+the migrating birds.  The birds perhaps have the best of it thus far, but
+the bird is limited to a small range of performances while he shifts his
+singing-boughs through the climates of the continent, whereas the poet,
+though a little inclined to mistake aspiration for inspiration, and
+vagueness of longing for subtlety, is experimenting in a most hopeful
+manner.  And all these writers, while perhaps not consciously American or
+consciously seeking to do more than their best in their several ways, are
+animated by the free spirit of inquiry and expression that belongs to an
+independent nation, and so our literature is coming to have a stamp of
+its own that is unlike any other national stamp.  And it will have this
+stamp more authentically and be clearer and stronger as we drop the self-
+consciousness of the necessity of being American.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+JUNE
+
+Here is June again!  It never was more welcome in these Northern
+latitudes.  It seems a pity that such a month cannot be twice as long.
+It has been the pet of the poets, but it is not spoiled, and is just as
+full of enchantment as ever.  The secret of this is that it is the month
+of both hope and fruition.  It is the girl of eighteen, standing with all
+her charms on the eve of womanhood, in the dress and temperament of
+spring.  And the beauty of it is that almost every woman is young, if
+ever she were young, in June.  For her the roses bloom, and the red
+clover.  It is a pity the month is so short.  It is as full of vigor as
+of beauty.  The energy of the year is not yet spent; indeed, the world is
+opening on all sides; the school-girl is about to graduate into liberty;
+and the young man is panting to kick or row his way into female adoration
+and general notoriety.  The young men have made no mistake about the kind
+of education that is popular with women.  The women like prowess and the
+manly virtues of pluck and endurance.  The world has not changed in this
+respect. It was so with the Greeks; it was so when youth rode in
+tournaments and unhorsed each other for the love of a lady.  June is the
+knightly month.  On many a field of gold and green the heroes will kick
+their way into fame; and bands of young women, in white, with their
+diplomas in their hands, star-eyed mathematicians and linguists, will
+come out to smile upon the victors in that exhibition of strength that
+women most admire.  No, the world is not decaying or losing its
+juvenility.  The motto still is, "Love, and may the best man win!"  How
+jocund and immortal is woman!  Now, in a hundred schools and colleges,
+will stand up the solemn, well-intentioned man before a row of pretty
+girls, and tell them about Womanhood and its Duties, and they will listen
+just as shyly as if they were getting news, and needed to be instructed
+by a man on a subject which has engaged their entire attention since they
+were five years old.  In the light of science and experience the conceit
+of men is something curious.  And in June! the most blossoming, riant,
+feminine time of the year.  The month itself is a liberal education to
+him who is not insensible to beauty and the strong sweet promise of life.
+The streams run clear then, as they do not in April; the sky is high and
+transparent; the world seems so large and fresh and inviting.  Our
+houses, which six months in the year in these latitudes are
+fortifications of defense, are open now, and the breath of life flows
+through them.  Even over the city the sky is benign, and all the country
+is a heavenly exhibition.  May was sweet and capricious.  This is the
+maidenhood deliciousness of the year.  If you were to bisect the heart of
+a true poet, you would find written therein JUNE.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of As We Go by Charles Dudley Warner
+