Worldly Ways and Byways Part 6

We certainly are the most eccentric race on the surface of the globe and ought to be a delight to the soul of an explorer, so full is our civilization of contradictions, unexplained habits and curious customs.

It is quite unnecessary for the inquisitive gentlemen who pa.s.s their time prying into other people's affairs and then returning home to write books about their discoveries, to risk their lives and digestions in long journeys into Central Africa or to the frozen zones, while so much good material lies ready to their hands in our own land. The habits of the "natives" in New England alone might occupy an active mind indefinitely, offering as interesting problems as any to be solved by penetrating Central Asia or visiting the man-eating tribes of Australia.

Perhaps one of our scientific celebrities, before undertaking his next long voyage, will find time to make observations at home and collect sufficient data to answer some questions that have long puzzled my unscientific brain. He would be doing good work. Fame and honors await the man who can explain why, for instance, sane Americans of the better cla.s.s, with money enough to choose their surroundings, should pa.s.s so much of their time in hotels and boarding houses. There must be a reason for the vogue of these retreats--every action has a cause, however remote. I shall await with the deepest interest a paper on this subject from one of our great explorers, untoward circ.u.mstances having some time ago forced me to pa.s.s a few days in a popular establishment of this cla.s.s.

During my visit I amused myself by observing the inmates and trying to discover why they had come there. So far as I could find out, the greater part of them belonged to our well-to-do cla.s.s, and when at home doubtless lived in luxurious houses and were waited on by trained servants. In the small summer hotel where I met them, they were living in dreary little ten by twelve foot rooms, containing only the absolute necessities of existence, a wash-stand, a bureau, two chairs and a bed.

And such a bed! One mattress about four inches thick over squeaking slats, cotton sheets, so nicely calculated to the size of the bed that the slightest move on the part of the sleeper would detach them from their moorings and undo the housemaid's work; two limp, discouraged pillows that had evidently been "banting," and a few towels a foot long with a surface like sand-paper, completed the fittings of the room. Baths were unknown, and hot water was a luxury distributed sparingly by a capricious handmaiden. It is only fair to add that everything in the room was perfectly clean, as was the coa.r.s.e table linen in the dining room.

The meals were in harmony with the rooms and furniture, consisting only of the strict necessities, cooked with a Spartan disregard for such sybarite foibles as seasoning or dressing. I believe there was a substantial meal somewhere in the early morning hours, but I never succeeded in getting down in time to inspect it. By successful bribery, I induced one of the village belles, who served at table, to bring a cup of coffee to my room. The first morning it appeared already poured out in the cup, with sugar and cold milk added at her discretion. At one o'clock a dinner was served, consisting of soup (occasionally), one meat dish and attendant vegetables, a meagre dessert, and nothing else. At half-past six there was an equally rudimentary meal, called "tea," after which no further food was distributed to the inmates, who all, however, seemed perfectly contented with this arrangement. In fact they apparently looked on the act of eating as a disagreeable task, to be hurried through as soon as possible that they might return to their aimless rocking and chattering.

Instead of dinner hour being the feature of the day, uniting people around an attractive table, and attended by conversation, and the meal lasting long enough for one's food to be properly eaten, it was rushed through as though we were all trying to catch a train. Then, when the meal was over, the boarders relapsed into apathy again.

No one ever called this hospitable home a boarding-house, for the proprietor was furious if it was given that name. He also scorned the idea of keeping a hotel. So that I never quite understood in what relation he stood toward us. He certainly considered himself our host, and ignored the financial side of the question severely. In order not to hurt his feelings by speaking to him of money, we were obliged to get our bills by strategy from a male subordinate. Mine host and his family were apparently unaware that there were people under their roof who paid them for board and lodging. We were all looked upon as guests and "entertained," and our rights impartially ignored.

Nothing, I find, is so distinctive of New England as this graceful veiling of the practical side of life. The landlady always reminded me, by her manner, of Barrie's description of the bill-sticker's wife who "cut" her husband when she chanced to meet him "professionally" engaged.

As a result of this extreme detachment from things material, the house ran itself, or was run by incompetent Irish and negro "help." There were no bells in the rooms, which simplified the service, and nothing could be ordered out of meal hours.

The material defects in board and lodging sink, however, into insignificance before the moral and social unpleasantness of an establishment such as this. All ages, all conditions, and all creeds are promiscuously huddled together. It is impossible to choose whom one shall know or whom avoid. A horrible burlesque of family life is enabled, with all its inconveniences and none of its sanct.i.ty. People from different cities, with different interests and standards, are expected to "chum" together in an intimacy that begins with the eight o'clock breakfast and ends only when all retire for the night. No privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you take a book and begin to read in a remote corner of a parlor or piazza, some idle matron or idiotic girl will tranquilly invade your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of her affairs and the day's gossip. There is no escape unless you mount to your ten-by-twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they visit Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other conveniences. Even such retirement is resented by the boarders. You are thought to be haughty and to give yourself airs if you do not sit for twelve consecutive hours each day in unending conversation with them.

When one reflects that thousands of our countrymen pa.s.s at least one-half of their lives in these asylums, and that thousands more in America know no other homes, but move from one hotel to another, while the same outlay would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings, it does seem as if these modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-ouins," were gradually returning to prehistoric habits and would end by eating roots promiscuously in caves.

The contradiction appears more marked the longer one reflects on the love of independence and impatience of all restraint that characterize our race. If such an inst.i.tution had been conceived by people of the Old World, accustomed to moral slavery and to a thousand petty tyrannies, it would not be so remarkable, but that we, of all the races of the earth, should have created a form of torture unknown to Louis XI. or to the Spanish Inquisitors, is indeed inexplicable! Outside of this happy land the inst.i.tution is unknown. The _pension_ when it exists abroad, is only an exotic growth for an American market. Among European nations it is undreamed of; the poorest when they travel take furnished rooms, where they are served in private, or go to restaurants or _table d'hotes_ for their meals. In a strictly continental hotel the public parlor does not exist. People do not travel to make acquaintances, but for health or recreation, or to improve their minds. The enforced intimacy of our American family house, with its attendant quarrelling and back-biting, is an infliction of which Europeans are in happy ignorance.

One explanation, only, occurs to me, which is that among New England people, largely descended from Puritan stock, there still lingers some blind impulse at self-mortification, an hereditary inclination to make this life as disagreeable as possible by self-immolation. Their ancestors, we are told by Macaulay, suppressed bull baiting, not because it hurt the bull, but because it gave pleasure to the people. Here in New England they refused the Roman dogma of Purgatory and then with complete inconsistency, invented the boarding-house, in order, doubtless, to take as much of the joy as possible out of this life, as a preparation for endless bliss in the next.

No. 15--A False Start

Having had, during a wandering existence, many opportunities of observing my compatriots away from home and familiar surroundings in various circles of cosmopolitan society, at foreign courts, in diplomatic life, or unofficial capacities, I am forced to acknowledge that whereas my countrywoman invariably a.s.sumed her new position with grace and dignity, my countryman, in the majority of cases, appeared at a disadvantage.

I take particular pleasure in making this tribute to my "sisters" tact and wit, as I have been accused of being "hard" on American women, and some half-humorous criticisms have been taken seriously by over-susceptible women--doubtless troubled with guilty consciences for nothing is more exact than the old French proverb, "It is only the truth that wounds."

The fact remains clear, however, that American men, as regards polish, facility in expressing themselves in foreign languages, the arts of pleasing and entertaining, in short, the thousand and one nothings composing that agreeable whole, a cultivated member of society, are inferior to their womankind. I feel sure that all Americans who have travelled and have seen their compatriot in his social relations with foreigners, will agree with this, reluctant as I am to acknowledge it.

That a sister and brother brought up together, under the same influences, should later differ to this extent seems incredible. It is just this that convinces me we have made a false start as regards the education and ambitions of our young men.

To find the reasons one has only to glance back at our past. After the struggle that insured our existence as a united nation, came a period of great prosperity. When both seemed secure, we did not pause and take breath, as it were, before entering a new epoch of development, but dashed ahead on the old lines. It is here that we got on the wrong road.

Naturally enough too, for our peculiar position on this continent, far away from the centres of cultivation and art, surrounded only by less successful states with which to compare ourselves, has led us into forming erroneous ideas as to the proportions of things, causing us to exaggerate the value of material prosperity and undervalue matters of infinitely greater importance, which have been neglected in consequence.

A man who, after fighting through our late war, had succeeded in ama.s.sing a fortune, naturally wished his son to follow him on the only road in which it had ever occurred to him that success was of any importance. So beyond giving the boy a college education, which he had not enjoyed, his ambition rarely went; his idea being to make a practical business man of him, or a lawyer, that he could keep the estate together more intelligently. In thousands of cases, of course, individual taste and bent over-ruled this influence, and a career of science or art was chosen; but in the ma.s.s of the American people, it was firmly implanted that the pursuit of wealth was the only occupation to which a reasonable human being could devote himself. A young man who was not in some way engaged in increasing his income was looked upon as a very undesirable member of society, and sure, sooner or later, to come to harm.

Millionaires declined to send their sons to college, saying they would get ideas there that would unfit them for business, to Paterfamilias the one object of life. Under such fostering influences, the ambitions in our country have gradually given way to money standards and the false start has been made! Leaving aside at once the question of money in its relation to our politics (although it would be a fruitful subject for moralizing), and confining ourselves strictly to the social side of life, we soon see the results of this mammon worship.

In England (although Englishmen have been contemptuously called the shop- keepers of the world) the extension and maintenance of their vast empire is the mainspring which keeps the great machine in movement. And one sees tens of thousands of well-born and delicately-bred men cheerfully entering the many branches of public service where the hope of wealth can never come, and retiring on pensions or half-pay in the strength of their middle age, apparently without a regret or a thought beyond their country's well-being.

In France, where the pa.s.sionate love of their own land has made colonial extension impossible, the modern Frenchman of education is more interested in the yearly exhibition at the _Salon_ or in a successful play at the _Francais_, than in the stock markets of the world.

Would that our young men had either of these bents! They have copied from England a certain love of sport, without the English climate or the calm of country and garrison life, to make these sports logical and necessary. As the young American millionaire thinks he must go on increasing his fortune, we see the anomaly of a man working through a summer's day in Wall Street, then dashing in a train to some suburban club, and appearing a half-hour later on the polo field. Next to wealth, sport has become the ambition of the wealthy cla.s.ses, and has grown so into our college life that the number of students in the freshman cla.s.s of our great universities is seriously influenced by that inst.i.tution's losses or gains at football.

What is the result of all this? A young man starts in life with the firm intention of making a great deal of money. If he has any time left from that occupation he will devote it to sport. Later in life, when he has leisure and travels, or is otherwise thrown with cultivated strangers, he must naturally be at a disadvantage. "Shop," he cannot talk; he knows that is vulgar. Music, art, the drama, and literature are closed books to him, in spite of the fact that he may have a box on the grand tier at the opera and a couple of dozen high-priced "masterpieces" hanging around his drawing-rooms. If he is of a finer clay than the general run of his cla.s.s, he will realize dimly that somehow the goal has been missed in his life race. His chase after the material has left him so little time to cultivate the ideal, that he has prepared himself a sad and aimless old age; unless he can find pleasure in doing as did a man I have been told about, who, receiving half a dozen millions from his father's estate, conceived the n.o.ble idea of increasing them so that he might leave to each of his four children as much as he had himself received. With the strictest economy, and by suppressing out of his life and that of his children all amus.e.m.e.nts and superfluous outlay, he has succeeded now for many years in living on the income of his income. Time will never hang heavy on this Harpagon's hands. He is a perfectly happy individual, but his conversation is hardly of a kind to attract, and it may be doubted if the rest of the family are as much to be envied.

An artist who had lived many years of his life in Paris and London was speaking the other day of a curious phase he had remarked in our American life. He had been accustomed over there to have his studio the meeting- place of friends, who would drop in to smoke and lounge away an hour, chatting as he worked. To his astonishment, he tells me that since he has been in New York not one of the many men he knows has ever pa.s.sed an hour in his rooms. Is not that a significant fact? Another remark which points its own moral was repeated to me recently. A foreigner visiting here, to whom American friends were showing the sights of our city, exclaimed at last: "You have not pointed out to me any celebrities except millionaires. 'Do you see that man? he is worth ten millions. Look at that house! it cost one million dollars, and there are pictures in it worth over three million dollars. That trotter cost one hundred thousand dollars,' etc." Was he not right? And does it not give my reader a shudder to see in black and white the phrases that are, nevertheless, so often on our lips?

This levelling of everything to its cash value is so ingrained in us that we are unconscious of it, as we are of using slang or local expressions until our attention is called to them. I was present once at a farce played in a London theatre, where the audience went into roars of laughter every time the stage American said, "Why, certainly." I was indignant, and began explaining to my English friend that we never used such an absurd phrase. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Why, certainly," I said, and stopped, catching the twinkle in his eye.

It is very much the same thing with money. We do not notice how often it slips into the conversation. "Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh." Talk to an American of a painter and the charm of his work.

He will be sure to ask, "Do his pictures sell well?" and will lose all interest if you say he can't sell them at all. As if that had anything to do with it!

Remembering the well-known anecdote of Schopenhauer and the gold piece which he used to put beside his plate at the _table d'hote_, where he ate, surrounded by the young officers of the German army, and which was to be given to the poor the first time he heard any conversation that was not about promotion or women, I have been tempted to try the experiment in our clubs, changing the subjects to stocks and sport, and feel confident that my contributions to charity would not ruin me.

All this has had the result of making our men dull companions; after dinner, or at a country house, if the subject they love is tabooed, they talk of nothing! It is sad for a rich man (unless his mind has remained entirely between the leaves of his ledger) to realize that money really buys very little, and above a certain amount can give no satisfaction in proportion to its bulk, beyond that delight which comes from a sense of possession. Croesus often discovers as he grows old that he has neglected to provide himself with the only thing that "is a joy for ever"--a cultivated intellect--in order to ama.s.s a fortune that turns to ashes, when he has time to ask of it any of the pleasures and resources he fondly imagined it would afford him. Like Talleyrand's young man who would not learn whist, he finds that he has prepared for himself a dreadful old age!

No. 16--A Holy Land

Not long ago an article came under my notice descriptive of the neighborhood around Grant's tomb and the calm that midsummer brings to that vicinity, laughingly referred to as the "Holy Land."

As careless fingers wandering over the strings of a violin may unintentionally strike a chord, so the writer of those lines, all unconsciously, with a jest, set vibrating a world of tender memories and a.s.sociations; for the region spoken of is truly a holy land to me, the playground of my youth, and connected with the sweetest ties that can bind one's thoughts to the past.

Ernest Renan in his _Souvenirs d'Enfance_, tells of a Brittany legend, firmly believed in that wild land, of the vanished city of "Is," which ages ago disappeared beneath the waves. The peasants still point out at a certain place on the coast the site of the fabled city, and the fishermen tell how during great storms they have caught glimpses of its belfries and ramparts far down between the waves; and a.s.sert that on calm summer nights they can hear the bells chiming up from those depths. I also have a vanished "Is" in my heart, and as I grow older, I love to listen to the murmurs that float up from the past. They seem to come from an infinite distance, almost like echoes from another life.

At that enchanted time we lived during the summers in an old wooden house my father had re-arranged into a fairly comfortable dwelling. A tradition, which no one had ever taken the trouble to verify, averred that Washington had once lived there, which made that hero very real to us. The picturesque old house stood high on a slope where the land rises boldly; with an admirable view of distant mountain, river and opposing Palisades.

The new Riverside drive (which, by the bye, should make us very lenient toward the men who robbed our city a score of years ago, for they left us that vast work in atonement), has so changed the neighborhood it is impossible now for pious feet to make a pilgrimage to those childish shrines. One house, however, still stands as when it was our nearest neighbor. It had sheltered General Gage, land for many acres around had belonged to him. He was an enthusiastic gardener, and imported, among a hundred other fruits and plants, the "Queen Claude" plum from France, which was successfully acclimated on his farm. In New York a plum of that kind is still called a "green gage." The house has changed hands many times since we used to play around the Grecian pillars of its portico. A recent owner, dissatisfied doubtless with its cla.s.sic simplicity, has painted it a cheerful mustard color and crowned it with a fine new _Mansard_ roof. Thus disfigured, and shorn of its surrounding trees, the poor old house stands blankly by the roadside, reminding one of the Greek statue in Anstey's "Painted Venus" after the London barber had decorated her to his taste. When driving by there now, I close my eyes.

Another house, where we used to be taken to play, was that of Audubon, in the park of that name. Many a rainy afternoon I have pa.s.sed with his children choosing our favorite birds in the gla.s.s cases that filled every nook and corner of the tumble-down old place, or turning over the leaves of the enormous volumes he would so graciously take down from their places for our amus.e.m.e.nt. I often wonder what has become of those vast _in-folios_, and if any one ever opens them now and admires as we did the glowing colored plates in which the old ornithologist took such pride.

There is something infinitely sad in the idea of a collection of books slowly gathered together at the price of privations and sacrifices, cherished, fondled, lovingly read, and then at the owner's death, coldly sent away to stand for ever unopened on the shelves of some public library. It is like neglecting poor dumb children!

An event that made a profound impression on my childish imagination occurred while my father, who was never tired of improving our little domain, was cutting a pathway down the steep side of the slope to the river. A great slab, dislodged by a workman's pick, fell disclosing the grave of an Indian chief. In a low archway or shallow cave sat the skeleton of the chieftain, his bows and arrows arranged around him on the ground, mingled with fragments of an elaborate costume, of which little remained but the bead-work. That it was the tomb of a man great among his people was evident from the care with which the grave had been prepared and then hidden, proving how, hundreds of years before our civilization, another race had chosen this n.o.ble cliff and stately river landscape as the fitting framework for a great warrior's tomb.

This discovery made no little stir in the scientific world of that day.

Hundreds came to see it, and as photography had not then come into the world, many drawings were made and casts taken, and finally the whole thing was removed to the rooms of the Historical Society. From that day the lonely little path held an awful charm for us. Our childish readings of Cooper had developed in us that love of the Indian and his wild life, so characteristic of boyhood thirty years ago. On still summer afternoons, the place had a primeval calm that froze the young blood in our veins. Although we prided ourselves on our quality as "braves," and secretly pined to be led on the war-path, we were shy of walking in that vicinity in daylight, and no power on earth, not even the offer of the tomahawk or snow-shoes for which our souls longed, would have taken us there at night.

A place connected in my memory with a tragic a.s.sociation was across the river on the last southern slope of the Palisades. Here we stood breathless while my father told the brief story of the duel between Burr and Hamilton, and showed us the rock stained by the younger man's life- blood. In those days there was a simple iron railing around the spot where Hamilton had expired, but of later years I have been unable to find any trace of the place. The tide of immigration has brought so deep a deposit of "saloons" and suburban "b.a.l.l.s" that the very face of the land is changed, old lovers of that sh.o.r.e know it no more. Never were the environs of a city so wantonly and recklessly degraded. Munic.i.p.alities have vied with millionaires in soiling and debasing the exquisite sh.o.r.es of our river, that, thirty years ago, were unrivalled the world over.

The glamour of the past still lies for me upon this landscape in spite of its many defacements. The river whispers of boyish boating parties, and the woods recall a thousand childish hopes and fears, resolute departures to join the pirates, or the red men in their strongholds--journeys boldly carried out until twilight cooled our courage and the supper-hour proved a stronger temptation than war and carnage.

When I sat down this summer evening to write a few lines about happy days on the banks of the Hudson, I hardly realized how sweet those memories were to me. The rewriting of the old names has evoked from their long sleep so many loved faces. Arms seem reaching out to me from the past.

The house is very still to-night. I seem to be nearer my loved dead than to the living. The bells of my lost "Is" are ringing clear in the silence.