The "Goldfish" Part 5

Since my first experience in house parties I have yielded weakly to my wife's importunities on several hundred similar occasions. Some of these visits have been fairly enjoyable. Sleep is sometimes possible. Servants are not always neglectful. Discretion in the matter of food and drink is conceivable, even if not probable, and occasionally one meets congenial persons.

As a rule, however, all the hypocrisies of society are intensified threefold when heterogeneous people are thrown into the enforced contact of a Sunday together in the country; but the artificiality and insincerity of smart society is far less offensive than the pretentiousness of mere wealth.

Not long ago I attended a dinner given on Fifth Avenue the invitation to which had been eagerly awaited by my wife. We were asked to dine informally with a middle-aged couple who for no obvious reason have been accepted as fashionable desirables. He is the retired head of a great combination of capital usually described as a trust. A canopy and a carpet covered the sidewalk outside the house. Two flunkies in c.o.c.kaded hats stood beside the door, and in the hall was a line of six liveried lackeys. Three maids helped my wife remove her wraps and adjust her hair.

In the salon where our hostess received us were hung pictures representing an outlay of nearly two million dollars--part of a collection the balance of which they keep in their house in Paris; for these people are not content with one mansion on Fifth Avenue and a country house on Long Island, but own a palace overlooking the Bois de Boulogne and an enormous estate in Scotland. They spend less than ten weeks in New York, six in the country, and the rest of the year abroad.

The other male guests had all ama.s.sed huge fortunes and had given up active work. They had been, in their time, in the thick of the fray. Yet these men, who had swayed the destinies of the industrial world, stood about awkwardly discussing the most trivial of ba.n.a.lities, as if they had never had a vital interest in anything.

Then the doors leading into the dining room were thrown open, disclosing a table covered with rosetrees in full bloom five feet in height and a concealed orchestra began to play. There were twenty-four seats and a footman for each two chairs, besides two butlers, who directed the service. The dinner consisted of hors-d'oeuvre and grapefruit, turtle soup, fish of all sorts, elaborate entrees, roasts, b.r.e.a.s.t.s of plover served separately with salad, and a riot of ices and exotic fruits.

Throughout the meal the host discoursed learnedly on the relative excellence of various vintages of champagne and the difficulty of procuring cigars suitable for a gentleman to smoke. It appeared that there was no longer any wine--except a few bottles in his own cellar--which was palatable or healthful. Even coffee was not fit for use unless it had been kept for six years! His own cigars were made to order from a selected crop of tobacco he had bought up entire. His cigarettes, which were the size of small sausages, were prepared from specially cured leaves of plants grown on "sunny corners of the walls of Smyrna." His Rembrandts, his Botticellis, his Sir Joshuas, his Hoppners, were little things he had picked up here and there, but which, he admitted, were said to be rather good.

Soon all the others were talking wine, tobacco and Botticelli as well as they could, though most of them knew more about coal, cotton or creosote than the subjects they were affecting to discuss.

This, then, was success! To flounder helplessly in a mire of artificiality and deception to Tales of Hoffmann!

If I were asked what was the object of our going to such a dinner I could only answer that it was in order to be invited to others of the same kind. Is it for this we labor and worry--that we scheme and conspire--that we debase ourselves and lose our self-respect? Is there no wine good enough for my host? Will G.o.d let such arrogance be without a blast of fire from heaven?

There was a time not so very long ago when this same man was thankful enough for a slice of meat and a chunk of bread carried in a tin pail--content with the comfort of an old brier pipe filled with cut plug and smoked in a sunny corner of the factory yard. "Sunny corners of the walls of Smyrna!"

It is a fine thing to a.s.sert that here in America we have "out of a democracy of opportunity" created "an aristocracy of achievement." The phrase is stimulating and perhaps truly expresses the spirit of our energetic and ambitious country; but an aristocracy of achievement is truly n.o.ble only when the achievements themselves are fine. What are the achievements that win our applause, for which we bestow our decorations in America? Do we honor most the men who truly serve their generation and their country? Or do we fawn, rather, on those who merely serve themselves?

It is a matter of pride with us--frequently expressed in disparagement of our European contemporaries--that we are a nation of workers; that to hold any position in the community every man must have a job or otherwise lose caste; that we tolerate no loafing. We do not conceal our contempt for the chap who fails to go down every day to the office or business. Often, of course, our ostentatious workers go down, but do very little work. We feel somehow that every man owes it to the community to put in from six to ten hours' time below the residential district.

Young men who have inherited wealth are as chary of losing one hour as their clerks. The busy millionaire sits at his desk all day--his ear to the telephone. We a.s.sume that these men are useful because they are busy; but in what does their usefulness consist? What are they busy about? They are setting an example of mere industry, perhaps--but to what end? Simply, in seven cases out of ten, in order to get a few dollars or a few millions more than they have already. Their exertions have no result except to enable their families to live in even greater luxury.

I know at least fifty men, fathers of families, whose homes might radiate kindliness and sympathy and set an example of wise, generous and broad-minded living, who, already rich beyond their needs, rush downtown before their children have gone to school, pa.s.s hectic, nerve-racking days in the ama.s.sing of more money, and return after their little ones have gone to bed, too utterly exhausted to take the slightest interest in what their wives have been doing or in the pleasure and welfare of their friends.

These men doubtless give liberally to charity, but they give impersonally, not generously; they are in reality utterly selfish, engrossed in the enthralling game of becoming successful or more successful men, sacrificing their homes, their families and their health--for what? To get on; to better their position; to push in among those others who, simply because they have outstripped the rest in the matter of filling their own pockets, are hailed with acclamation.

It is pathetic to see intelligent, capable men bending their energies not to leading wholesome, well-rounded, serviceable lives but to gaining a slender foothold among those who are far less worthy of emulation than themselves and with whom they have nothing whatsoever in common except a despicable ambition to display their wealth and to demonstrate that they have "social position."

In what we call the Old World a man's social position is a matter of fixed cla.s.sification--that is to say, his presumptive ability and qualifications to amuse and be amused; to hunt, fish and shoot; to ride, dance, and make himself generally agreeable--are known from the start.

And, based on the premise that what is known as society exists simply for the purpose of enabling people to have a good time, there is far more reason to suppose that one who comes of a family which has made a specialty of this pursuit for several hundred years is better endowed by Nature for that purpose than one who has made a million dollars out of a patent medicine or a lucky speculation in industrial securities.

The great manufacturer or chemist in England, France, Italy, or Germany, the clever inventor, the astute banker, the successful merchant, have their due rewards; but, except in obvious instances, they are not presumed to have acquired incidentally to their material prosperity the arts of playing billiards, making love, shooting game on the wing, entertaining a house party or riding to hounds. Occasionally one of them becomes by special favor of the sovereign a baronet; but, as a rule his so-called social position is little affected by his business success, and there is no reason why it should be. He may make a fortune out of a new process, but he invites the same people to dinner, frequents the same club and enjoys himself in just about the same way as he did before. His newly acquired wealth is not regarded as in itself likely to make him a more congenial dinner-table companion or any more delightful at five-o'clock tea.

The aristocracy of England and the Continent is not an aristocracy of achievement but of the polite art of killing time pleasantly. As such it has a reason for existence. Yet it can at least be said for it that its founders, however their descendants may have deteriorated, gained their original t.i.tles and positions by virtue of their services to their king and country.

However, with a strange perversity--due perhaps to our having the Declaration of Independence crammed down our throats as children--we in America seem obsessed with an ambition to create a social aristocracy, loudly proclaimed as founded on achievement, which, in point of fact, is based on nothing but the possession of money. The achievement that most certainly lands one among the crowned heads of the American n.o.bility is admittedly the achievement of having acquired in some way or other about five million dollars; and it is immaterial whether its possessor got it by hard work, inheritance, marriage or the invention of a porous plaster.

In the wider circle of New York society are to be found a considerable number of amiable persons who have bought their position by the lavish expenditure of money ama.s.sed through the clever advertising and sale of table relishes, throat emollients, fireside novels, canned edibles, cigarettes, and chewing tobacco. The money was no doubt legitimately earned. The patent-medicine man and the millionaire tailor have my entire respect. I do not sneer at honest wealth acquired by these humble means. The rise--if it be a rise--of these and others like them is superficial evidence, perhaps, that ours is a democracy. Looking deeper, we see that it is, in fact, proof of our utter and shameless sn.o.bbery.

Most of these people are in society not on account of their personal qualities, or even by virtue of the excellence of their cut plug or throat wash which, in truth, may be a real boon to mankind--but because they have that most imperative of all necessities--money. The achievement by which they have become aristocrats is not the kind of achievement that should have ent.i.tled them to the distinction which is theirs. They are received and entertained for no other reason whatever save that they can receive and entertain in return. Their bank accounts are at the disposal of the other aristocrats--and so are their houses, automobiles and yachts. The brevet of n.o.bility--by achievement--is conferred on them, and the American people read of their comings and goings, their b.a.l.l.s, dinners and other festivities with consuming and reverent interest. Most dangerously significant of all is the fact that, so long as the applicant for social honors has the money, the method by which he got it, however reprehensible, is usually overlooked. That a man is a thief, so long as he has stolen enough, does not impair his desirability. The achievement of wealth is sufficient in itself to ent.i.tle him to a seat in the American House of Lords.

A substantial portion of the entertaining that takes place on Fifth Avenue is paid for out of pilfered money. Ten years ago this rhetorical remark would have been sneered at as demagogic. To-day everybody knows that it is simply the fact. Yet we continue to eat with entire unconcern the dinners that have, as it were, been abstracted from the dinner-pails of the poor. I cannot conduct an investigation into the business history of every man who asks me to his house. And even if I know he has been a crook, I cannot afford to stir up an unpleasantness by attempting in my humble way to make him feel sorrow for his misdeeds. If I did I might find myself alone--deserted by the rest of the aristocracy who are concerned less with his morality than with the vintage of his wine and the _dot_ he is going to give his daughter.

The methods by which a newly rich American purchases a place among our n.o.bility are simple and direct. He does not storm the inner citadel of society but at the start ingratiates himself with its lazy and easy-going outposts. He rents a house in a fashionable country suburb of New York and goes in and out of town on the "dude" train. He soon learns what professional people mingle in smart society and these he bribes to receive him and his family. He buys land and retains a "smart" lawyer to draw his deeds and attend to the transfer of t.i.tle. He engages a fashionable architect to build his house, and a society young lady who has gone into landscape gardening to lay out his grounds. He cannot work the game through his dentist or plumber, but he establishes friendly relations with the swell local medical man and lets him treat an imaginary illness or two. He has his wife's portrait painted by an artist who makes a living off similar aspirants, and in exchange gets an invitation to drop in to tea at the studio. He buys broken-winded hunters from the hunting set, decrepit ponies from the polo players, and stone griffins for the garden from the social sculptress.

A couple of hundred here, a couple of thousand there, and he and his wife are dining out among the people who run things. Once he gets a foothold, the rest is by comparison easy. The bribes merely become bigger and more direct. He gives a landing to the yacht club, a silver mug for the horse show, and an altar rail to the church. He entertains wisely--gracefully discarding the doctor, lawyer, architect and artist as soon as they are no longer necessary. He has, of course, already opened an account with the fashionable broker who lives near him, and insured his life with the well-known insurance man, his neighbor. He also plays poker daily with them on the train.

This is the period during which he becomes a willing, almost eager, mark for the decayed sport who purveys bad champagne and vends his own brand of noxious cigarettes. He achieves the Stock Exchange Crowd without difficulty and moves on up into the Banking Set composed of trust company presidents, millionaires who have nothing but money, and the elite of the stockbrokers and bond men who handle their private business.

The family are by this time "going almost everywhere"; and in a year or two, if the money holds out, they can buy themselves into the inner circles. It is only necessary to take a villa at Newport and spend about one hundred thousand dollars in the course of the season. The walls of the city will fall down flat if the golden trumpet blows but mildly. And then, there they are--right in the middle of the champagne, clambakes and everything else!--invited to sit with the choicest of America's n.o.bility on golden chairs--supplied from New York at one dollar per--and to dance to the strains of the most expensive music amid the subdued popping of distant corks.

In this social Arabian Nights' dream, however, you will find no sailors or soldiers, no great actors or writers, no real poets or artists, no genuine statesmen. The nearest you will get to any of these is the millionaire senator, or the amateur decorators and portrait painters who, by making capital of their acquaintance, get a living out of society. You will find few real people among this crowd of intellectual children.

The time has not yet come in America when a leader of smart society dares to invite to her table men and women whose only merit is that they have done something worth while. She is not sufficiently sure of her own place. She must continue all her social life to be seen only with the "right people." In England her position would be secure and she could summon whom she would to dine with her; but in New York we have to be careful lest, by asking to our houses some distinguished actor or novelist, people might think we did not know we should select our friends--not for what they are, but for what they have.

In a word, the viciousness of our social hierarchy lies in the fact that it is based solely upon material success. We have no t.i.tles of n.o.bility; but we have Coal Barons, Merchant Princes and Kings of Finance. The very catchwords of our slang tell the story. The achievement of which we boast as the foundation of our aristocracy is indeed ign.o.ble; but, since there is no other, we and our sons, and their sons after them, will doubtless continue to struggle--and perhaps steal--to prove, to the satisfaction of ourselves and the world at large, that we are ent.i.tled to be received into the n.o.bility of America not by virtue of our good deeds, but of our so-called success.

We would not have it otherwise. We should cry out against any serious attempt, outside of the pulpit, to alter or readjust an order that enables us to buy for money a position of which we would be otherwise undeserving. It would be most discouraging to us to have subst.i.tuted for the present arrangement a society in which the only qualifications for admittance were those of charm, wit, culture, good breeding and good sportsmanship.

CHAPTER III

MY CHILDREN

I pride myself on being a man of the world--in the better sense of the phrase. I feel no regret over the pa.s.sing of those romantic days when maidens swooned at the sight of a drop of blood or took refuge in the "vapors" at the approach of a strange young man; in point of fact I do not believe they ever did. I imagine that our popular idea of the fragility and sensitiveness of the weaker s.e.x, based on the accounts of novelists of the eighteenth century, is largely a literary convention.

Heroines were endowed, as a matter of course, with the possession of all the female virtues, intensified to such a degree that they were covered with burning blushes most of the time. Languor, hysteria and general debility were regarded as the outward indications of a sweet and gentle character. Woman was a tendril clinging to the strong oak of masculinity. Modesty was her cardinal virtue. One is, of course, ent.i.tled to speculate on the probable contemporary causes for the seeming overemphasis placed on this admirable characteristic. Perhaps feminine honesty was so rare as to be at a premium and modesty was a sort of electric sign of virtue.

I am not squeamish. I have always let my children read what they would.

I have never made a mystery of the relations of the s.e.xes, for I know the call of the unseen--the fascination lent by concealment, of discovery. I believe frankness to be a good thing. A mind that is startled or shocked by the exposure of an ankle or the sight of a stocking must be essentially impure. Nor do I quarrel with woman's natural desire to adorn herself for the allurement of man. That is as inevitable as springtime.

But unquestionably the general tone of social intercourse in America, at least in fashionable centers, has recently undergone a marked and striking change. The athletic girl of the last twenty years, the girl who invited tan and freckles, wielded the tennis bat in the morning and lay basking in a bathing suit on the sand at noon, is gradually giving way to an entirely different type--a type modeled, it would seem, at least so far as dress and outward characteristics are concerned, on the French demimondaine. There are plenty of athletic girls to be found on the golf links and tennis courts; but a growing and large minority of maidens at the present time are too chary of their complexions to brave the sun. Big hats, cloudlike veils, high heels, paint and powder mark the pa.s.sing of the vain hope that woman can attract the male s.e.x by virtue of her eugenic possibilities alone.

It is but another and unpleasantly suggestive indication that the simplicity of an older generation--the rugged virtue of a more frugal time--has given place to the sophistication of the Continent. When I was a lad, going abroad was a rare and costly privilege. A youth who had been to Rome, London and Paris, and had the unusual opportunity of studying the treasures of the Vatican, the Louvre and the National Gallery, was regarded with envy. Americans went abroad for culture; to study the glories of the past.

Now the family that does not invade Europe at least every other summer is looked on as hopelessly old-fashioned. No clerk can find a job on the Rue de Rivoli or the Rue de la Paix unless he speaks fluently the dialect of the customers on whose trade his employer chiefly relies--those from Pennsylvania, New York and Illinois. The American no longer goes abroad for improvement, but to amuse himself. The college Freshman knows, at least by name, the latest beauty who haunts the Folies Bergeres, and his father probably has a refined and intimate familiarity with the special attractions of Ciro's and the Trocadero.

I do not deny that we have learned valuable lessons from the Parisians.

At any rate our cooking has vastly improved. Epicurus would have difficulty in choosing between the delights of New York and Paris--for, after all, New York is Paris and Paris is New York. The chef of yesterday at Voisin's rules the kitchen of the Ritz-Carlton or the Plaza to-day; and he cannot have traveled much who does not find a dozen European acquaintances among the head waiters of Broadway. Not to know Paris nowadays is felt to be as great a humiliation as it was fifty years ago not to know one's Bible.

Beyond the larger number of Americans who visit Paris for legitimate or semilegitimate purposes, there is a substantial fraction who go to do things they either cannot or dare not do at home. And as those who have not the time or the money to cross the Atlantic and who still itch for the boulevards must be kept contented, Broadway is turned into Montmartre. The result is that we cannot take our daughters to the theater without risking familiarizing them with vice in one form or another. I do not think I am overstating the situation when I say that it would be reasonably inferred from most of our so-called musical shows and farces that the natural, customary and excusable amus.e.m.e.nt of the modern man after working hours--whether the father of a family or a youth of twenty--is a promiscuous adventuring into s.e.xual immorality.

I do not regard as particularly dangerous the vulgar French farce where papa is caught in some extraordinary and buffoonlike situation with the washerwoman. Safety lies in exaggeration. But it is a different matter with the ordinary Broadway show, where virtue is made--at least inferentially--the object of ridicule, and s.e.xuality is the underlying purpose of the production. During the present New York theatrical season several plays have been already censored by the authorities, and either been taken off entirely or so altered as to be still within the bounds of legal pruriency.

Whether I am right in attributing it to the influence of the French music halls or not, it is the fact that the tone of our theatergoing public is essentially low. Boys and girls who are taken in their Christmas holidays to see plays at which their parents applaud questionable songs and suggestive dances, cannot be blamed for a.s.suming that there is not one set of morals for the stage and another for ordinary social intercourse.

Hence the college boy who has kept straight for eight months in the year is apt to wonder: What is the use? And the debutante who is curious for all the experiences her new liberty makes possible takes it for granted that an amorous trifling is the ordinary incident to masculine attention.