The Complete Essays of C. D. Warner

C >> Charles Dudley Warner >> The Complete Essays of C. D. Warner


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.




DOES REFINEMENT KILL INDIVIDUALITY?

Is it true that cultivation, what we call refinement, kills
individuality? Or, worse than that even, that one loses his taste by
over-cultivation? Those persons are uninteresting, certainly, who have
gone so far in culture that they accept conventional standards supposed
to be correct, to which they refer everything, and by which they measure
everybody. Taste usually implies a sort of selection; the cultivated
taste of which we speak is merely a comparison, no longer an individual
preference or appreciation, but only a reference to the conventional and
accepted standard. When a man or woman has reached this stage of
propriety we are never curious any more concerning their opinions on any
subject. We know that the opinions expressed will not be theirs, evolved
out of their own feeling, but that they will be the cut-and-dried results
of conventionality.

It is doubtless a great comfort to a person to know exactly how to feel
and what to say in every new contingency, but whether the zest of life is
not dulled by this ability is a grave question, for it leaves no room for
surprise and little for emotion. O ye belles of Newport and of Bar
Harbor, in your correct and conventional agreement of what is proper and
agreeable, are you wasting your sweet lives by rule? Is your compact,
graceful, orderly society liable to be monotonous in its gay repetition
of the same thing week after week? Is there nothing outside of that
envied circle which you make so brilliant? Is the Atlantic shore the only
coast where beauty may lounge and spread its net of enchantment? The
Atlantic shore and Europe? Perhaps on the Pacific you might come back to
your original selves, and find again that freedom and that charm of
individuality that are so attractive. Some sparkling summer morning, if
you chanced to drive four-in-hand along the broad beach at Santa Barbara,
inhaling, the spicy breeze from the Sandwich Islands, along the curved
shore where the blue of the sea and the purple of the mountains remind
you of the Sorrentine promontory, and then dashed away into the canon of
Montecito, among the vineyards and orange orchards and live-oaks and
palms, in vales and hills all ablaze with roses and flowers of the garden
and the hothouse, which bloom the year round in the gracious sea-air,
would you not, we wonder, come to yourselves in the sense of a new life
where it is good form to be enthusiastic and not disgraceful to be
surprised? It is a far cry from Newport to Santa Barbara, and a whole
world of new sensations lies on the way, experiences for which you will
have no formula of experience. To take the journey is perhaps too heroic
treatment for the disease of conformity--the sort of malaria of our
exclusive civilization.

The Drawer is not urging this journey, nor any break-up of the social
order, for it knows how painful a return to individuality may be. It is
easier to go on in the subordination of one's personality to the strictly
conventional life. It expects rather to record a continually perfected
machinery, a life in which not only speech but ideas are brought into
rule. We have had something to say occasionally of the art of
conversation, which is in danger of being lost in the confused babel of
the reception and the chatter of the dinner-party--the art of listening
and the art of talking both being lost. Society is taking alarm at this,
and the women as usual are leaders in a reform. Already, by reason of
clubs-literary, scientific, economic--woman is the well-informed part of
our society. In the "Conversation Lunch" this information is now brought
into use. The lunch, and perhaps the dinner, will no longer be the
occasion of satisfying the appetite or of gossip, but of improving talk.
The giver of the lunch will furnish the topic of conversation. Two
persons may not speak at once; two persons may not talk with each other;
all talk is to be general and on the topic assigned, and while one is
speaking, the others must listen. Perhaps each lady on taking her seat
may find in her napkin a written slip of paper which shall be the guide
to her remarks. Thus no time is to be wasted on frivolous topics. The
ordinary natural flow of rejoinder and repartee, the swirling of talk
around one obstacle and another, its winding and rippling here and there
as individual whim suggests, will not be allowed, but all will be
improving, and tend to that general culture of which we have been
speaking. The ladies' lunch is not to be exactly a debating society, but
an open occasion for the delivery of matured thought and the acquisition
of information.

The object is not to talk each other down, but to improve the mind,
which, unguided, is apt to get frivolous at the convivial board. It is
notorious that men by themselves at lunch or dinner usually shun grave
topics and indulge in persiflage, and even descend to talk about wine and
the made dishes. The women's lunch of this summer takes higher ground. It
will give Mr. Browning his final estimate; it will settle Mr. Ibsen; it
will determine the suffrage question; it will adjudicate between the
total abstainers and the halfway covenant of high license; it will not
hesitate to cut down the tariff.

The Drawer anticipates a period of repose in all our feverish social
life. We shall live more by rule and less by impulse. When we meet we
shall talk on set topics, determined beforehand. By this concentration we
shall be able as one man or one woman to reach the human limit of
cultivation, and get rid of all the aberrations of individual assertion
and feeling. By studying together in clubs, by conversing in monotone and
by rule, by thinking the same things and exchanging ideas until we have
none left, we shall come into that social placidity which is one dream of
the nationalists--one long step towards what may be called a prairie
mental condition--the slope of Kansas, where those who are five thousand
feet above the sea-level seem to be no higher than those who dwell in the
Missouri Valley.




THE DIRECTOIRE GOWN

We are all more or less devoted to 'liberte', 'egalite', and considerable
'fraternite', and we have various ways of showing it. It is the opinion
of many that women do not care much about politics, and that if they are
interested at all in them, they are by nature aristocrats. It is said,
indeed, that they care much more about their dress than they do about the
laws or the form of government. This notion arises from a misapprehension
both of the nature of woman and of the significance of dress.

Men have an idea that fashions are haphazard, and are dictated and guided
by no fixed principles of action, and represent no great currents in
politics or movements of the human mind. Women, who are exceedingly
subtle in all their operations, feel that it is otherwise. They have a
prescience of changes in the drift of public affairs, and a delicate
sensitiveness that causes them to adjust their raiment to express these
changes. Men have written a great deal in their bungling way about the
philosophy of clothes. Women exhibit it, and if we should study them more
and try to understand them instead of ridiculing their fashions as whims
bred of an inconstant mind and mere desire for change, we would have a
better apprehension of the great currents of modern political life and
society.

Many observers are puzzled by the gradual and insidious return recently
to the mode of the Directoire, and can see in it no significance other
than weariness of some other mode. We need to recall the fact of the
influence of the centenary period upon the human mind. It is nearly a
century since the fashion of the Directoire. What more natural,
considering the evidence that we move in spirals, if not in circles, that
the signs of the anniversary of one of the most marked periods in history
should be shown in feminine apparel? It is woman's way of hinting what is
in the air, the spirit that is abroad in the world. It will be remembered
that women took a prominent part in the destruction of the Bastile,
helping, indeed, to tear down that odious structure with their own hands,
the fall of which, it is well known, brought in the classic Greek and
republican simplicity, the subtle meaning of the change being expressed
in French gowns. Naturally there was a reaction from all this towards
aristocratic privileges and exclusiveness, which went on for many years,
until in France monarchy and empire followed the significant leadership
of the French modistes. So strong was this that it passed to other
countries, and in England the impulse outlasted even the Reform Bill, and
skirts grew more and more bulbous, until it did not need more than three
or four women to make a good-sized assembly. This was not the result of,
a whim about clothes, but a subtle recognition of a spirit of
exclusiveness and defense abroad in the world. Each woman became her own
Bastile. Men surrounded it and thundered against it without the least
effect. It seemed as permanent as the Pyramids. At every male attack it
expanded, and became more aggressive and took up more room. Women have
such an exquisite sense of things--just as they have now in regard to big
obstructive hats in the theatres. They know that most of the plays are
inferior and some of them are immoral, and they attend the theatres with
head-dresses that will prevent as many people as possible from seeing the
stage and being corrupted by anything that takes place on it. They object
to the men seeing some of the women who are now on the stage. It
happened, as to the private Bastiles, that the women at last recognized a
change in the sociological and political atmosphere of the world, and
without consulting any men of affairs or caring for their opinion, down
went the Bastiles. When women attacked them, in obedience to their
political instincts, they collapsed like punctured balloons. Natural
woman was measurably (that is, a capacity of being measured) restored to
the world. And we all remember the great political revolutionary
movements of 1848.

Now France is still the arbiter of the modes. Say what we may about
Berlin, copy their fashion plates as we will, or about London, or New
York, or Tokio, it is indisputable that the woman in any company who has
on a Paris gown--the expression is odious, but there is no other that in
these days would be comprehended--"takes the cake." It is not that the
women care for this as a mere matter of apparel. But they are sensitive
to the political atmosphere, to the philosophical significance that it
has to great impending changes. We are approaching the centenary of the
fall of the Bastile. The French have no Bastile to lay low, nor, indeed,
any Tuileries to burn up; but perhaps they might get a good way ahead by
demolishing Notre Dame and reducing most of Paris to ashes. Apparently
they are on the eve of doing something. The women of the world may not
know what it is, but they feel the approaching recurrence of a period.
Their movements are not yet decisive. It is as yet only tentatively that
they adopt the mode of the Directoire. It is yet uncertain--a sort of
Boulangerism in dress. But if we watch it carefully we shall be able to
predict with some assurance the drift in Paris. The Directoire dress
points to another period of republican simplicity, anarchy, and the rule
of a popular despot.

It is a great pity, in view of this valuable instinct in women and the
prophetic significance of dress, that women in the United States do not
exercise their gifts with regard to their own country. We should then
know at any given time whether we are drifting into Blaineism, or
Clevelandism, or centralization, or free-trade, or extreme protection, or
rule by corporations. We boast greatly of our smartness. It is time we
were up and dressed to prove it.




THE MYSTERY OF THE SEX

There appears to be a great quantity of conceit around, especially
concerning women. The statement was recently set afloat that a well-known
lady had admitted that George Meredith understands women better than any
writer who has preceded him. This may be true, and it may be a wily
statement to again throw men off the track; at any rate it contains the
old assumption of a mystery, practically insoluble, about the gentler
sex. Women generally encourage this notion, and men by their gingerly
treatment of it seemed to accept it. But is it well-founded, is there any
more mystery about women--than about men? Is the feminine nature any more
difficult to understand than the masculine nature? Have women, conscious
of inferior strength, woven this notion of mystery about themselves as a
defense, or have men simply idealized them for fictitious purposes? To
recur to the case cited, is there any evidence that Mr. Meredith
understands human nature--as exhibited in women any better than human
nature--in men, or is more consistent in the production of one than of
the other? Historically it would be interesting to trace the rise of this
notion of woman as an enigma. The savage races do not appear to have it.
A woman to the North American Indian is a simple affair, dealt with
without circumlocution. In the Bible records there is not much mystery
about her; there are many tributes to her noble qualities, and some
pretty severe and uncomplimentary things are said about her, but there is
little affectation of not understanding her. She may be a prophetess, or
a consoler, or a snare, but she is no more "deceitful and desperately
wicked" than anybody else. There is nothing mysterious about her first
recorded performance. Eve trusted the serpent, and Adam trusted Eve. The
mystery was in the serpent. There is no evidence that the ancient
Egyptian woman was more difficult to comprehend than the Egyptian man.
They were both doubtless wily as highly civilized people are apt to be;
the "serpent of old Nile" was in them both. Is it in fact till we come to
mediaeval times, and the chivalric age, that women are set up as being
more incomprehensible than men? That is, less logical, more whimsical,
more uncertain in their mental processes? The play-writers and essayists
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries "worked" this notion
continually. They always took an investigating and speculating attitude
towards women, that fostered the conceit of their separateness and veiled
personality. Every woman was supposed to be playing a part behind a mask.
Montaigne is always investigating woman as a mystery. It is, for
instance, a mystery he does not relish that, as he says, women commonly
reserve the publication of their vehement affections for their husbands
till they have lost them; then the woful countenance "looks not so much
back as forward, and is intended rather to get a new husband than to
lament the old." And he tells this story:

"When I was a boy, a very beautiful and virtuous lady who is yet living,
and the widow of a prince, had, I know not what, more ornament in her
dress than our laws of widowhood will well allow, which being reproached
with as a great indecency, she made answer 'that it was because she was
not cultivating more friendships, and would never marry again.'" This
cynical view of woman, as well as the extravagantly complimentary one
sometimes taken by the poets, was based upon the notion that woman was an
unexplainable being. When she herself adopted the idea is uncertain. Of
course all this has a very practical bearing upon modern life, the
position of women in it, and the so-called reforms. If woman is so
different from man, to the extent of being an unexplainable mystery,
science ought to determine the exact state of the case, and ascertain if
there is any remedy for it. If it is only a literary creation, we ought
to know it. Science could tell, for instance, whether there is a
peculiarity in the nervous system, any complications in the nervous
centres, by which the telegraphic action of the will gets crossed, so
that, for example, in reply to a proposal of marriage, the intended "Yes"
gets delivered as "No." Is it true that the mental process in one sex is
intuitive, and in the other logical, with every link necessary and
visible? Is it true, as the romancers teach, that the mind in one sex
acts indirectly and in the other directly, or is this indirect process
only characteristic of exceptions in both sexes? Investigation ought to
find this out, so that we can adjust the fit occupations for both sexes
on a scientific basis. We are floundering about now in a sea of doubt. As
society becomes more complicated, women will become a greater and greater
mystery, or rather will be regarded so by themselves and be treated so by
men.

Who can tell how much this notion of mystery in the sex stands in the way
of its free advancement all along the line? Suppose the proposal were
made to women to exchange being mysterious for the ballot? Would they do
it? Or have they a sense of power in the possession of this conceded
incomprehensibility that they would not lay down for any visible insignia
of that power? And if the novelists and essayists have raised a mist
about the sex, which it willingly masquerades in, is it not time that the
scientists should determine whether the mystery exists in nature or only
in the imagination?




THE CLOTHES OF FICTION

The Drawer has never undervalued clothes. Whatever other heresies it may
have had, however it may have insisted that the more a woman learns, the
more she knows of books, the higher her education is carried in all the
knowledges, the more interesting she will be, not only for an hour, but
as a companion for life, it has never said that she is less attractive
when dressed with taste and according to the season. Love itself could
scarcely be expected to survive a winter hat worn after Easter. And the
philosophy of this is not on the surface, nor applicable to women only.
In this the highest of created things are under a law having a much wider
application. Take as an item novels, the works of fiction, which have
become an absolute necessity in the modern world, as necessary to divert
the mind loaded with care and under actual strain as to fill the vacancy
in otherwise idle brains. They have commonly a summer and a winter
apparel. The publishers understand this. As certainly as the birds
appear, comes the crop of summer novels, fluttering down upon the stalls,
in procession through the railway trains, littering the drawing-room
tables, in light paper, covers, ornamental, attractive in colors and
fanciful designs, as welcome and grateful as the girls in muslin. When
the thermometer is in the eighties, anything heavy and formidable is
distasteful. The housekeeper knows we want few solid dishes, but salads
and cooling drinks. The publisher knows that we want our literature (or
what passes for that) in light array. In the winter we prefer the boards
and the rich heavy binding, however light the tale may be; but in the
summer, though the fiction be as grave and tragic as wandering love and
bankruptcy, we would have it come to us lightly clad--out of stays, as it
were.

It would hardly be worth while to refer to this taste in the apparel of
our fiction did it not have deep and esoteric suggestions, and could not
the novelists themselves get a hint from it. Is it realized how much
depends upon the clothes that are worn by the characters in the novels
--clothes put on not only to exhibit the inner life of the characters,
but to please the readers who are to associate with them? It is true that
there are novels that almost do away with the necessity of fashion
magazines and fashion plates in the family, so faithful are they in the
latest millinery details, and so fully do they satisfy the longing of all
of us to know what is chic for the moment. It is pretty well understood,
also, that women, and even men, are made to exhibit the deepest passions
and the tenderest emotions in the crises of their lives by the clothes
they put on. How the woman in such a crisis hesitates before her
wardrobe, and at last chooses just what will express her innermost
feeling! Does she dress for her lover as she dresses to receive her
lawyer who has come to inform her that she is living beyond her income?
Would not the lover be spared time and pain if he knew, as the novelist
knows, whether the young lady is dressing for a rejection or an
acceptance? Why does the lady intending suicide always throw on a
waterproof when she steals out of the house to drown herself? The
novelist knows the deep significance of every article of toilet, and
nature teaches him to array his characters for the summer novel in the
airy draperies suitable to the season. It is only good art that the cover
of the novel and the covers of the characters shall be in harmony. He
knows, also, that the characters in the winter novel must be adequately
protected. We speak, of course, of the season stories. Novels that are to
run through a year, or maybe many years, and are to set forth the
passions and trials of changing age and varying circumstance, require
different treatment and wider millinery knowledge. They are naturally
more expensive. The wardrobe required in an all-round novel would
bankrupt most of us.

But to confine ourselves to the season novel, it is strange that some one
has not invented the patent adjustable story that with a slight change
would do for summer or winter, following the broad hint of the
publishers, who hasten in May to throw whatever fiction they have on hand
into summer clothes. The winter novel, by this invention, could be easily
fitted for summer wear. All the novelist need do would be to change the
clothes of his characters. And in the autumn, if the novel proved
popular, he could change again, with the advantage of being in the latest
fashion. It would only be necessary to alter a few sentences in a few of
the stereotype pages. Of course this would make necessary other slight
alterations, for no kind-hearted writer would be cruel to his own
creations, and expose them to the vicissitudes of the seasons. He could
insert "rain" for "snow," and "green leaves" for "skeleton branches,"
make a few verbal changes of that sort, and regulate the thermometer. It
would cost very little to adjust the novel in this way to any season. It
is worth thinking of.