The Art of Living as a Feminine Institution

Expressing a Vague Hope that the New Amendments will Not Do Away with the Old Amenities

JOHN PEALE BISHOP

WHETHER or not you consider America civilized, depends not so much upon how you look at America, as upon how you look at civilization. If civilization is as the grandiloquent phrase has it, man's conquest over nature, we have not only conquered nature and made a slave of her; we have converted her into a maid-of-all-work. We have not only taught the elemental forces to play Ariel and Caliban to our Prospero; we have made them into Pounds, the old family retainer. Besides the Wool worth building and the electric turbine, science has also presented us with the vacuum cleaner, the fireless cooker, desiccated eggs, and the patent dish-washer.

If, on the other hand, you believe civilization—to use a still more grandiloquent phrase — man's conquest over himself, the reverberation by which our present-day thunderers must be known to posterity are the paintings of Sargent and Bellows, the sculpture of Manship, the novels of Mrs. Wharton, the poetry of Vachell Lindsay and Carl Sandburg; or, in another field, the moral activities of Messieurs Bryan, Volstead and Straton and the statesmanship of, let us say, Roosevelt and Wilson.

These two views of civilization are both current, and both, possibly, true—though they are as far apart as optimism and pessimism.

But there is another phase of civilized society in America, of which I am, for the greater part of a day, more acutely conscious than either of these two. I am more pleasantly aware of being the heir of all the ages when choosing between the hors-d'oeuvres at dinner than when reading, let us say, the Jennie Gerhardt of Dreiser or The Golden Whales of California )v Vachell Lindsay. I am more intimately concerned with the decor of a room, than with the speed of the apartment elevator just outside its door. I am moved with more profound wonder at the manners and clothes of the people on Broadway than with the winking antics of the signs proclaiming the virtues of the Clippo Garter and the endurance of Ersatz Rubber Tires. In other words, we are all of us more concerned with the routine of living—it was once, I believe, called the art of living—than with anything else which separates us from the aborigines of Somaliland.

Now, it would be an overstatement to insist that the art of living is exclusively under the control of women, yet it is approximately true that the social arts—conversation, cookery, dress, manners, the more gracious forms of personal intercourse—owe their beginnings and continued cultivation to the care of women. It may be that women are not the mothers of social usages, but their foster-mothers. It is probably so. But in any state the transition from barbarism to conscious civilization is coincident with the rise of women to a position of importance. There were cities in France, before the XIIth Century, but there was precious little urbanity before ChreStien de Troyes devised, in his romances, a social -code for the Countess of Champagne and the ladies of her demesne. Courts were held in Edinburgh before Marie de Guise and Mary of Scots, but there was no courtliness. And as for those societies in which the art of living has reached its mortal perfection, are they not usually to be found everywhere in such periods as were dominated by women, the periods when women imparted a gracious freedom and a large-minded courtesy to the affairs of men?

In America, despite the fact that thbre has been, of late, a frantic hullabaloo against the Fathers of the Constitution, for intrusting the vote to masculine stupidity alone; in spite of a great deal of noisy rebellion against their own mental and physical peculiarities, women have enjoyed exceptional importance and independence. Yet they have been curiously inept or indifferent—I know not which—at caring for those things without which life remains as bare and as barbarous as the army or a monastery or any other mode of life regulated entirely by man. When we comedo examine their record—I fall naturally into the phrase—it is found a pitiable failure. When not indifferent, they have contented themselves with borrowing and adapting from Lurope, creating themselves almost nothing which is both gracious and national.

The National Cooking

LET us begin with the least gracious factor at issue,—that connected with cuisine.

To delve into the details of national cookery is far from a research magnificent. A one hundred per-cent American carte du jour includes such Lucullan trifles as the following: fried crullers, roast turkey, stuffed with wet india rubber oysters, corn-on-the-cob—the most unimaginative of vegetables, soda biscuits, Philadelphia scrapple, Boston baked beans, and New England Apple Pie (served with a block of that crumbly, rank substance known as American cheese), and the canned products of Chicago. There are others, no doubt, but the list will suffice.

Obviously, this is not the sort of food one finds in either fashionable or semi - fashionable houses. But pursue a perfectly appointed American dinner past the pantry and you will find, nine times out of ten, a French or Viennese cook and an English Butler. Only in the South and East does one ccme on what seems to be a traditional cuisine, and then very rarely. While there is an abundance of excellent food in America, it is scarcely ever American. We have not only failed to evolve an equivalent to a Filet Mignon Parisienne, we have not even Pieds de Cochon a la Ste. Menehould. Not only are the pastry cooks of Paris responsible for a hundred fantastic creations which add to the joy of living, but the housewives of almost every village have some dish in which they take great pride. Ste. Menehould is not so much the place where Louis XVI was recognized in his flight toward Montmedy, but the town of all others where one finds delicious pig's feet. Bar-le-duc is renowned not for the first velocipede, but for its confitures, while Dijon is not more proud of its Palais des Dues than of its gingerbread. The only sauce indigenous to America that I can recall is a thick, boiled, chrome-colored covering for lettuce, tasting of vinegar, sugar and mustard. Our substitution for the Truffes de Perigueux is a gummy snuff-hued substance known as Boston Brown Bread.

The National Architecture

IT is the same with our civilized abodes. Our country houses are charming—because of the borrowed charm of English country houses. Our town dwellings achieve a belated elegance derived from French chateaux. Beyond these lies the outer dreariness of left-over brown stone blocks and the meretricious scrollwork of the more prosperous store-keepers.

Indoors—the same monotonous tale: salons which achieve a faded grace because Louis XIV was a patron of the arts; the melancholy grandeur that was Florence of the quattrocentisti, the chaste elegance that was London in the XVIIIth Century. Even the overemphasized colonial influence—when it is not a backward glance toward the backwoodsman —is only English Georgian by way of the early sailing vessels. Beyond the confines of fashion, one finds golden oak, and, in silver painted frames, copies of Landseer, or the ungainly geometry of the carpenters of the 'mission period'. There is taste and discrimination in America, to be sure, but it is afflicted by a complex of promiscuous adoption. We have turned our own children out of the house to make way for a corporation of antique dealers.

Lest a misjudgment attend me, let me say I do not expect ladies to sit by day gnawing pencils and pricking their fingers with steelpointed dividers in an architect's office, and ponder by night on tomes of Americana, seeking to devise some new and strange architecture for country houses. No more do I expect them to become little Wilhelmina Morrises designing chairs or weaving tapestries of the "Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers". Their province is essentially one of selection. But they have selected the bad thing or the imported thing so long that there is no longer anything good in America to choose from.

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I hesitate, for obvious reasons, to speak of costume in America. No one expects nationalism in dress, except among peasants and German tourists. And as for the peasant costume of America— the sun-bonnet and calico wrapper of the South or the quasi-religious garb of the clod-trotters of German Pennsylvania—I am in favour of suppressing them by law. As for the rest, I countenance no war with the Rue de la Paix. The success of Benjamin Franklin's plain linen and sober prunella at the court of Louis XVI is not to be repeated. It was all very well for that colonial democrat to give the last frisson nouveau to the jaded nerves of the French aristocracy—simplicity after artificial refinement, but the flat common-sense shoes of the Y. M. C. A. secretariat of yesteryear simply impressed the French as boorish.

The National Conversation

TO generalize on conversation is, of necessity, more difficult. One is more limited to one's intimate experience. Yet it seems to me that mixed conversation in America languishes, and mixed conversation is assuredly directed, if not always dominated, by women. No one credits Madame de Sevigne or Lady Blessington with all the witty remarks made in their presence; yet without their presence the bon mots would probably have gone unmade. We have two national products: one the person with a "line", a sort of individual vaudeville turn, a juggling of set phrases, a divertissement of mannerisms; the other the virtuoso of speed, who says nothing as rapidly as possible and calls it repartee.

As for a genuine interest in ideas, spontaneous wit, or plucking of delicious phrases out of the air, they are met with but rarely. Instead, to introduce into conversation an idea capable of being unravelled in a diverting manner has the same effect as suddenly opening a window in a January snowstorm; a nervous frigidity at once pervades the occupants of the room. Scott Fitzgerald apparently has a monopoly on the witty flappers of the country; I have not met them except in his novels. Ideas, when they occur, have an air of being left over from a meeting of some Woman's Club; humour sooner or later evolves into the stereotyped anecdote.

In such a state then, in the present age, the amenities of life find themselves. Before attempting to inquire more curiously into the reasons therefor, there is one parenthetical remark which needs to be made.

It is easy to object to this stitching of words into phrases by saying that no one expects the art of living to be national; that the patrician is the same the world over, and it is only the newly opulent, the green grocers and the peasants who are different. But this is not quite true. The well-bred may speak the same language, but they do not make the same epigrams. Their manners may be intelligible each to each, but their mannerisms have a distinct racial flavour.

Having no more than the usual desire to be unfair, I must say that conditions over which they have no control have worked against women in these things. Without underrating a wanton indifference — touched perhaps by a naive belief that kind American hearts are more than coronets, and simple speech than epigrams—I would point out that there are circumstances which have stood in the way of their developing a native finesse in the art of living. And these are chiefly the lack of a permanent and socially powerful aristocracy, the frigid depression exerted on manners by Puritanism, and the inherited distrust of their own power to add to the fineness of things.

Our older aristocratic order has, in great part, either disappeared or become indigent. The so celebrated aristocracy of the South still breeds ladies and gentlemen, but they are no longer fashionable. When they have not fallen into a shiftless decadence, they remind one of the semi-barbarous gentry of XVIIIth century England, as reflected in Fielding's novels. The new wealth has almost eliminated the old aristocracy of the East and this new aristocracy has not the courage of its youth. With graduation from the class of the new and blatantly wealthy it tends to fall into a timorous colonialism. They are so anxious to appear to the English manner born, that they begin taking interest in the stables, drink Scotch and soda instead of the native highball, and cover their walls with portraits of a probably unknown English family, thereby acquiring an ambiguous manner that is neither aristocratic nor democratic, but only opu. lent,—belonging neither to England nor America, but to the ocean liner.

Suffrage and the Amenities

AS for the spirit of Puritanism, although it has been so largely maintained by women, it is, of course, not altogether of their invention: it is, in America, a universal phenomenon. Democracy has come to mean, not so much that one man is as good as another as that no man is good enough to order his life as he pleases. We have confused manners and morals in a way that not even the Latin word mos will explain. We long since adopted Dr. Watts's hymn book as a guide to etiquette, and the influence of -the Doctor's moral sentiments still tend to make our manners hard, cold and raw.

As to the American woman's distrust of her own power, it is perhaps possible to speculate on the influence of suffrage upon the self-consciousness of women in this matter of the amenities. All prophecies touching the influence of suffrage on politics, I leave to The New Republic and those more politically minded persons who deal in prophecies. Personally, I do not think women will surpass men either in the stupidity or intelligence of their government. As to the influence of the new amendment on the amenities, I am even more in the dark. Perhaps the essentially realistic minds of women will find the new freedom an illusion, and turn to those things which they have always been comparatively free to control. Perhaps suffrage will serve to relieve the persecution complex which in so many women has stood in need of psychoanalysis these many years. So, with a braver self-consciousness, woman may once more become what she has been in a more spacious past, and another Castiglione hear, as once the friend of the Duchess of Ferrara heard, proudminded women talk with courtesy and wisdom, "until the candle wicks grew yellow in the dawn".