As We Were Saying

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BACKLOG EDITION

THE COMPLETE WRITINGS

OF CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER


1904



AS WE WERE SAYING



CONTENTS:

AS WE WERE SAYING
ROSE AND CHRYSANTHEMUM
THE RED BONNET
THE LOSS IN CIVILIZATION
SOCIAL SCREAMING
DOES REFINEMENT KILL INDIVIDUALITY?
THE DIRECTOIRE GOWN
THE MYSTERY OF THE SEX
THE CLOTHES OF FICTION
THE BROAD A
CHEWING GUM
WOMEN IN CONGRESS
SHALL WOMEN PROPOSE?
FROCKS AND THE STAGE
ALTRUISM
SOCIAL CLEARING-HOUSE
DINNER-TABLE TALK
NATURALIZATION
ART OF GOVERNING
LOVE OF DISPLAY
VALUE OF THE COMMONPLACE
THE BURDEN OF CHRISTMAS
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF WRITERS
THE CAP AND GOWN
A TENDENCY OF THE AGE
A LOCOED NOVELIST






AS WE WERE SAYING




ROSE AND CHRYSANTHEMUM

The Drawer will still bet on the rose. This is not a wager, but only a
strong expression of opinion. The rose will win. It does not look so now.
To all appearances, this is the age of the chrysanthemum. What this gaudy
flower will be, daily expanding and varying to suit the whim of fashion,
no one can tell. It may be made to bloom like the cabbage; it may spread
out like an umbrella--it can never be large enough nor showy enough to
suit us. Undeniably it is very effective, especially in masses of
gorgeous color. In its innumerable shades and enlarging proportions, it
is a triumph of the gardener. It is a rival to the analine dyes and to
the marabout feathers. It goes along with all the conceits and fantastic
unrest of the decorative art. Indeed, but for the discovery of the
capacities of the chrysanthemum, modern life would have experienced a
fatal hitch in its development. It helps out our age of plush with a
flame of color. There is nothing shamefaced or retiring about it, and it
already takes all provinces for its own. One would be only
half-married--civilly, and not fashionably--without a chrysanthemum
wedding; and it lights the way to the tomb. The maiden wears a bunch of
it in her corsage in token of her blooming expectations, and the young
man flaunts it on his coat lapel in an effort to be at once effective and
in the mode. Young love that used to express its timid desire with the
violet, or, in its ardor, with the carnation, now seeks to bring its
emotions to light by the help of the chrysanthemum. And it can express
every shade of feeling, from the rich yellow of prosperous wooing to the
brick-colored weariness of life that is hardly distinguishable from the
liver complaint. It is a little stringy for a boutonniere, but it fills
the modern-trained eye as no other flower can fill it. We used to say
that a girl was as sweet as a rose; we have forgotten that language. We
used to call those tender additions to society, on the eve of their event
into that world which is always so eager to receive fresh young life,
"rose-buds"; we say now simply "buds," but we mean chrysanthemum buds.
They are as beautiful as ever; they excite the same exquisite interest;
perhaps in their maiden hearts they are one or another variety of that
flower which bears such a sweet perfume in all literature; but can it
make no difference in character whether a young girl comes out into the
garish world as a rose or as a chrysanthemum? Is her life set to the note
of display, of color and show, with little sweetness, or to that retiring
modesty which needs a little encouragement before it fully reveals its
beauty and its perfume? If one were to pass his life in moving in a
palace car from one plush hotel to another, a bunch of chrysanthemums in
his hand would seem to be a good symbol of his life. There are aged
people who can remember that they used to choose various roses, as to
their color, odor, and degree of unfolding, to express the delicate
shades of advancing passion and of devotion. What can one do with this
new favorite? Is not a bunch of chrysanthemums a sort of
take-it-or-leave-it declaration, boldly and showily made, an offer
without discrimination, a tender without romance? A young man will catch
the whole family with this flaming message, but where is that sentiment
that once set the maiden heart in a flutter? Will she press a
chrysanthemum, and keep it till the faint perfume reminds her of the
sweetest moment of her life?

Are we exaggerating this astonishing rise, development, and spread of the
chrysanthemum? As a fashion it is not so extraordinary as the hoop-skirt,
or as the neck ruff, which is again rising as a background to the lovely
head. But the remarkable thing about it is that heretofore in all nations
and times, and in all changes of fashion in dress, the rose has held its
own as the queen of flowers and as the finest expression of sentiment.
But here comes a flaunting thing with no desirable perfume, looking as if
it were cut with scissors out of tissue-paper, but capable of taking
infinite varieties of color, and growing as big as a curtain tassel, that
literally captures the world, and spreads all over the globe, like the
Canada thistle. The florists have no eye for anything else, and the
biggest floral prizes are awarded for the production of its
eccentricities. Is the rage for this flower typical of this fast and
flaring age?

The Drawer is not an enemy to the chrysanthemum, nor to the sunflower,
nor to any other gorgeous production of nature. But it has an
old-fashioned love for the modest and unobtrusive virtues, and an abiding
faith that they will win over the strained and strident displays of life.
There is the violet: all efforts of cultivation fail to make it as big as
the peony, and it would be no more dear to the heart if it were
quadrupled in size. We do, indeed, know that satisfying beauty and
refinement are apt to escape us when we strive too much and force nature
into extraordinary display, and we know how difficult it is to get mere
bigness and show without vulgarity. Cultivation has its limits. After we
have produced it, we find that the biggest rose even is not the most
precious; and lovely as woman is, we instinctively in our admiration put
a limit to her size. There being, then, certain laws that ultimately
fetch us all up standing, so to speak, it does seem probable that the
chrysanthemum rage will end in a gorgeous sunset of its splendor; that
fashion will tire of it, and that the rose, with its secret heart of
love; the rose, with its exquisite form; the rose, with its capacity of
shyly and reluctantly unfolding its beauty; the rose, with that odor--of
the first garden exhaled and yet kept down through all the ages of sin
--will become again the fashion, and be more passionately admired for its
temporary banishment. Perhaps the poet will then come back again and
sing. What poet could now sing of the "awful chrysanthemum of dawn"?




THE RED BONNET

The Drawer has no wish to make Lent easier for anybody, or rather to
diminish the benefit of the penitential season. But in this period of
human anxiety and repentance it must be said that not enough account is
made of the moral responsibility of Things. The doctrine is sound; the
only difficulty is in applying it. It can, however, be illustrated by a
little story, which is here confided to the reader in the same trust in
which it was received. There was once a lady, sober in mind and sedate in
manner, whose plain dress exactly represented her desire to be
inconspicuous, to do good, to improve every day of her life in actions
that should benefit her kind. She was a serious person, inclined to
improving conversation, to the reading of bound books that cost at least
a dollar and a half (fifteen cents of which she gladly contributed to the
author), and she had a distaste for the gay society which was mainly a
flutter of ribbons and talk and pretty faces; and when she meditated, as
she did in her spare moments, her heart was sore over the frivolity of
life and the emptiness of fashion. She longed to make the world better,
and without any priggishness she set it an example of simplicity and
sobriety, of cheerful acquiescence in plainness and inconspicuousness.

One day--it was in the autumn--this lady had occasion to buy a new hat.
From a great number offered to her she selected a red one with a dull red
plume. It did not agree with the rest of her apparel; it did not fit her
apparent character. What impulse led to this selection she could not
explain. She was not tired of being good, but something in the jauntiness
of the hat and the color pleased her. If it were a temptation, she did
not intend to yield to it, but she thought she would take the hat home
and try it. Perhaps her nature felt the need of a little warmth. The hat
pleased her still more when she got it home and put it on and surveyed
herself in the mirror. Indeed, there was a new expression in her face
that corresponded to the hat. She put it off and looked at it. There was
something almost humanly winning and temptatious in it. In short, she
kept it, and when she wore it abroad she was not conscious of its
incongruity to herself or to her dress, but of the incongruity of the
rest of her apparel to the hat, which seemed to have a sort of
intelligence of its own, at least a power of changing and conforming
things to itself. By degrees one article after another in the lady's
wardrobe was laid aside, and another substituted for it that answered to
the demanding spirit of the hat. In a little while this plain lady was
not plain any more, but most gorgeously dressed, and possessed with the
desire to be in the height of the fashion. It came to this, that she had
a tea-gown made out of a window-curtain with a flamboyant pattern.
Solomon in all his glory would have been ashamed of himself in her
presence.

But this was not all. Her disposition, her ideas, her whole life, was
changed. She did not any more think of going about doing good, but of
amusing herself. She read nothing but stories in paper covers. In place
of being sedate and sober-minded, she was frivolous to excess; she spent
most of her time with women who liked to "frivol." She kept Lent in the
most expensive way, so as to make the impression upon everybody that she
was better than the extremest kind of Lent. From liking the sedatest
company she passed to liking the gayest society and the most fashionable
method of getting rid of her time. Nothing whatever had happened to her,
and she is now an ornament to society.

This story is not an invention; it is a leaf out of life. If this lady
that autumn day had bought a plain bonnet she would have continued on in
her humble, sensible way of living. Clearly it was the hat that made the
woman, and not the woman the hat. She had no preconception of it; it
simply happened to her, like any accident--as if she had fallen and
sprained her ankle. Some people may say that she had in her a concealed
propensity for frivolity; but the hat cannot escape the moral
responsibility of calling it out if it really existed. The power of
things to change and create character is well attested. Men live up to or
live down to their clothes, which have a great moral influence on manner,
and even on conduct. There was a man run down almost to vagabondage,
owing to his increasingly shabby clothing, and he was only saved from
becoming a moral and physical wreck by a remnant of good-breeding in him
that kept his worn boots well polished. In time his boots brought up the
rest of his apparel and set him on his feet again. Then there is the
well-known example of the honest clerk on a small salary who was ruined
by the gift of a repeating watch--an expensive timepiece that required at
least ten thousand a year to sustain it: he is now in Canada.

Sometimes the influence of Things is good and sometimes it is bad. We
need a philosophy that shall tell us why it is one or the other, and fix
the responsibility where it belongs. It does no good, as people always
find out by reflex action, to kick an inanimate thing that has offended,
to smash a perverse watch with a hammer, to break a rocking-chair that
has a habit of tipping over backward. If Things are not actually
malicious, they seem to have a power of revenging themselves. We ought to
try to understand them better, and to be more aware of what they can do
to us. If the lady who bought the red hat could have known the hidden
nature of it, could have had a vision of herself as she was transformed
by it, she would as soon have taken a viper into her bosom as have placed
the red tempter on her head. Her whole previous life, her feeling of the
moment, show that it was not vanity that changed her, but the
inconsiderate association with a Thing that happened to strike her fancy,
and which seemed innocent. But no Thing is really powerless for good or
evil.




THE LOSS IN CIVILIZATION

Have we yet hit upon the right idea of civilization? The process which
has been going on ever since the world began seems to have a defect in
it; strength, vital power, somehow escapes. When you've got a man
thoroughly civilized you cannot do anything more with him. And it is
worth reflection what we should do, what could we spend our energies on,
and what would evoke them, we who are both civilized and enlightened, if
all nations were civilized and the earth were entirely subdued. That is
to say, are not barbarism and vast regions of uncultivated land a
necessity of healthful life on this globe? We do not like to admit that
this process has its cycles, that nations and men, like trees and fruit,
grow, ripen, and then decay. The world has always had a conceit that the
globe could be made entirely habitable, and all over the home of a
society constantly growing better. In order to accomplish this we have
striven to eliminate barbarism in man and in nature:

Is there anything more unsatisfactory than a perfect house, perfect
grounds, perfect gardens, art and nature brought into the most absolute
harmony of taste and culture? What more can a man do with it? What
satisfaction has a man in it if he really gets to the end of his power to
improve it? There have been such nearly ideal places, and how strong
nature, always working against man and in the interest of untamed
wildness, likes to riot in them and reduce them to picturesque
destruction! And what sweet sadness, pathos, romantic suggestion, the
human mind finds in such a ruin! And a society that has attained its end
in all possible culture, entire refinement in manners, in tastes, in the
art of elegant intellectual and luxurious living--is there nothing
pathetic in that? Where is the primeval, heroic force that made the joy
of living in the rough old uncivilized days? Even throw in goodness, a
certain amount of altruism, gentleness, warm interest in unfortunate
humanity--is the situation much improved? London is probably the most
civilized centre the world has ever seen; there are gathered more of the
elements of that which we reckon the best. Where in history, unless some
one puts in a claim for the Frenchman, shall we find a Man so nearly
approaching the standard we have set up of civilization as the
Englishman, refined by inheritance and tradition, educated almost beyond
the disturbance of enthusiasm, and cultivated beyond the chance of
surprise? We are speaking of the highest type in manner, information,
training, in the acquisition of what the world has to give. Could these
men have conquered the world? Is it possible that our highest
civilization has lost something of the rough and admirable element that
we admire in the heroes of Homer and of Elizabeth? What is this London,
the most civilized city ever known? Why, a considerable part of its
population is more barbarous, more hopelessly barbarous, than any wild
race we know, because they are the barbarians of civilization, the refuse
and slag of it, if we dare say that of any humanity. More hopeless,
because the virility of savagery has measurably gone out of it. We can do
something with a degraded race of savages, if it has any stamina in it.
What can be done with those who are described as "East-Londoners"?

Every great city has enough of the same element. Is this an accident, or
is it a necessity of the refinement that we insist on calling
civilization? We are always sending out missionaries to savage or
perverted nations, we are always sending out emigrants to occupy and
reduce to order neglected territory. This is our main business. How would
it be if this business were really accomplished, and there were no more
peoples to teach our way of life to, and no more territory to bring under
productive cultivation? Without the necessity of putting forth this
energy, a survival of the original force in man, how long would our
civilization last? In a word, if the world were actually all civilized,
wouldn't it be too weak even to ripen? And now, in the great centres,
where is accumulated most of that we value as the product of man's best
efforts, is there strength enough to elevate the degraded humanity that
attends our highest cultivation? We have a gay confidence that we can do
something for Africa. Can we reform London and Paris and New York, which
our own hands have made?

If we cannot, where is the difficulty? Is this a hopeless world? Must it
always go on by spurts and relapses, alternate civilization and
barbarism, and the barbarism being necessary to keep us employed and
growing? Or is there some mistake about our ideal of civilization? Does
our process too much eliminate the rough vigor, courage, stamina of the
race? After a time do we just live, or try to live, on literature warmed
over, on pretty coloring and drawing instead of painting that stirs the
soul to the heroic facts and tragedies of life? Where did this virile,
blood-full, throbbing Russian literature come from; this Russian painting
of Verestchagin, that smites us like a sword with the consciousness of
the tremendous meaning of existence? Is there a barbaric force left in
the world that we have been daintily trying to cover and apologize for
and refine into gentle agreeableness?

These questions are too deep for these pages. Let us make the world
pleasant, and throw a cover over the refuse. We are doing very well, on
the whole, considering what we are and the materials we have to work on.
And we must not leave the world so perfectly civilized that the
inhabitants, two or three centuries ahead, will have nothing to do.




SOCIAL SCREAMING

Of all the contrivances for amusement in this agreeable world the
"Reception" is the most ingenious, and would probably most excite the
wonder of an angel sent down to inspect our social life. If he should
pause at the entrance of the house where one is in progress, he would be
puzzled. The noise that would greet his ears is different from the deep
continuous roar in the streets, it is unlike the hum of millions of
seventeen-year locusts, it wants the musical quality of the spring
conventions of the blackbirds in the chestnuts, and he could not compare
it to the vociferation in a lunatic asylum, for that is really subdued
and infrequent. He might be incapable of analyzing this, but when he
caught sight of the company he would be compelled to recognize it as the
noise of our highest civilization. It may not be perfect, for there are
limits to human powers of endurance, but it is the best we can do. It is
not a chance affair. Here are selected, picked out by special invitation,
the best that society can show, the most intelligent, the most
accomplished, the most beautiful, the best dressed persons in the
community--all receptions have this character. The angel would notice
this at once, and he would be astonished at the number of such persons,
for the rooms would be so crowded that he would see the hopelessness of
attempting to edge or wedge his way through the throng without tearing
off his wings. An angel, in short, would stand no chance in one of these
brilliant assemblies on account of his wings, and he probably could not
be heard, on account of the low, heavenly pitch of his voice. His
inference would be that these people had been selected to come together
by reason of their superior power of screaming. He would be wrong.

--They are selected on account of their intelligence, agreeableness, and
power of entertaining each other. They come together, not for exercise,
but pleasure, and the more they crowd and jam and struggle, and the
louder they scream, the greater the pleasure. It is a kind of contest,
full of good-humor and excitement. The one that has the shrillest voice
and can scream the loudest is most successful. It would seem at first
that they are under a singular hallucination, imagining that the more
noise there is in the room the better each one can be heard, and so each
one continues to raise his or her voice in order to drown the other
voices. The secret of the game is to pitch the voice one or two octaves
above the ordinary tone. Some throats cannot stand this strain long; they
become rasped and sore, and the voices break; but this adds to the
excitement and enjoyment of those who can scream with less inconvenience.
The angel would notice that if at any time silence was called, in order
that an announcement of music could be made, in the awful hush that
followed people spoke to each other in their natural voices, and
everybody could be heard without effort. But this was not the object of
the Reception, and in a moment more the screaming would begin again, the
voices growing higher and higher, until, if the roof were taken off, one
vast shriek would go up to heaven.

This is not only a fashion, it is an art. People have to train for it,
and as it is a unique amusement, it is worth some trouble to be able to
succeed in it. Men, by reason of their stolidity and deeper voices, can
never be proficients in it; and they do not have so much practice--unless
they are stock-brokers. Ladies keep themselves in training in their
ordinary calls. If three or four meet in a drawing-room they all begin to
scream, not that they may be heard--for the higher they go the less they
understand each other--but simply to acquire the art of screaming at
receptions. If half a dozen ladies meeting by chance in a parlor should
converse quietly in their sweet, ordinary home tones, it might be in a
certain sense agreeable, but it would not be fashionable, and it would
not strike the prevailing note of our civilization. If it were true that
a group of women all like to talk at the same time when they meet (which
is a slander invented by men, who may be just as loquacious, but not so
limber-tongued and quick-witted), and raise their voices to a shriek in
order to dominate each other, it could be demonstrated that they would be
more readily heard if they all spoke in low tones. But the object is not
conversation; it is the social exhilaration that comes from the wild
exercise of the voice in working off a nervous energy; it is so seldom
that in her own house a lady gets a chance to scream.

The dinner-party, where there are ten or twelve at table, is a favorite
chance for this exercise. At a recent dinner, where there were a dozen
uncommonly intelligent people, all capable of the most entertaining
conversation, by some chance, or owing to some nervous condition, they
all began to speak in a high voice as soon as they were seated, and the
effect was that of a dynamite explosion. It was a cheerful babel of
indistinguishable noise, so loud and shrill and continuous that it was
absolutely impossible for two people seated on the opposite sides of the
table, and both shouting at each other, to catch an intelligible
sentence. This made a lively dinner. Everybody was animated, and if there
was no conversation, even between persons seated side by side, there was
a glorious clatter and roar; and when it was over, everybody was hoarse
and exhausted, and conscious that he had done his best in a high social
function.

This topic is not the selection of the Drawer, the province of which is
to note, but not to criticise, the higher civilization. But the inquiry
has come from many cities, from many women, "Cannot something be done to
stop social screaming?" The question is referred to the scientific branch
of the Social Science Association. If it is a mere fashion, the
association can do nothing. But it might institute some practical
experiments. It might get together in a small room fifty people all let
loose in the ordinary screaming contest, measure the total volume of
noise and divide it by fifty, and ascertain how much throat power was
needed in one person to be audible to another three feet from the
latter's ear. This would sift out the persons fit for such a contest. The
investigator might then call a dead silence in the assembly, and request
each person to talk in a natural voice, then divide the total noise as
before, and see what chance of being heard an ordinary individual had in
it. If it turned out in these circumstances that every person present
could speak with ease and hear perfectly what was said, then the order
might be given for the talk to go on in that tone, and that every person
who raised the voice and began to scream should be gagged and removed to
another room. In this room could be collected all the screamers to enjoy
their own powers. The same experiment might be tried at a dinner-party,
namely, to ascertain if the total hum of low voices in the natural key
would not be less for the individual voice to overcome than the total
scream of all the voices raised to a shriek. If scientific research
demonstrated the feasibility of speaking in an ordinary voice at
receptions, dinner-parties, and in "calls," then the Drawer is of opinion
that intelligible and enjoyable conversation would be possible on these
occasions, if it becomes fashionable not to scream.