The "Goldfish"
I believe, fortunately—and my belief is based on a fairly wide range of observation—that the Continental influence I have described has produced its ultimate effect chiefly among the rich; yet its operation is distinctly observable throughout American life. Nowhere is this more patent than in much of our current magazine literature and light fiction. These stories, under the guise of teaching some moral lesson, are frequently designed to stimulate all the emotions that could be excited by the most vicious French novel. Some of them, of course, throw off all pretense and openly ape the petit histoire d'un amour; but essentially all are alike. The heroine is a demimondaine in everything but her alleged virtue—the hero a young bounder whose better self restrains him just in time. A conventional marriage on the last page legalizes what would otherwise have been a liaison or a degenerate flirtation.
The astonishingly unsophisticated and impossibly innocent shopgirl who—in the story—just escapes the loss of her honor; the noble young man who heroically "marries the girl"; the adventures of the debonaire actress, who turns out most surprisingly to be an angel of sweetness and light; and the Johnny whose heart is really pure gold, and who, to the reader's utter bewilderment, proves himself to be a Saint George—these are the leading characters in a great deal of our periodical literature.
A friend of mine who edits one of the more successful magazines tells me there are at least half a dozen writers who are paid guaranteed salaries of from twelve thousand dollars to eighteen thousand dollars a year for turning out each month from five thousand to ten thousand words of what is euphemistically termed "hot stuff." An erotic writer can earn yearly at the present time more than the salary of the president of the United States. What the physical result of all this is going to be does not seem to me to matter much. If the words of Jesus Christ have any significance we are already debased by our imaginations.
* * * * *We are dangerously near an epoch of intellectual if not carnal debauchery. The prevailing tendency on the part of the young girls of to-day to imitate the dress and makeup of the Parisian cocotte is unconsciously due to this general lowering of the social moral tone. Young women in good society seem to feel that they must enter into open competition with their less fortunate sisters. And in this struggle for survival they are apparently determined to yield no advantage. Herein lies the popularity of the hobble skirt, the transparent fabric that hides nothing and follows the move of every muscle, and the otherwise senseless peculiarities and indecencies of the more extreme of the present fashions.
And here, too, is to be found the reason for the popularity of the current style of dancing, which offers no real attraction except the opportunity for a closeness of contact otherwise not permissible.
"It's all in the way it is done," says Mrs. Jones, making the customary defense. "The tango and the turkey trot can be danced as unobjectionably as the waltz."
Exactly! Only the waltz is not danced that way; and if it were the offending couple would probably be put off the floor. Moreover, their origin and history demonstrates their essentially vicious character. Is there any sensible reason why one's daughter should be encouraged to imitate the dances of the Apache and the negro debauchee? Perhaps, after all, the pendulum has merely swung just a little too far and is knocking against the case. The feet of modern progress cannot be hampered by too much of the dead underbrush of convention.
The old-fashioned prudery that in former days practically prevented rational conversation between men and women is fortunately a thing of the past, and the fact that it is no longer regarded as unbecoming for women to take an interest in all the vital problems of the day—municipal, political and hygienic—provided they can assist in their solution, marks several milestones on the highroad of advance.
On the other hand the widespread familiarity with these problems, which has been engendered simply for pecuniary profit by magazine literature in the form of essays, fiction and even verse, is by no means an undiluted blessing—particularly if the accentuation of the author is on the roses lining the path of dalliance quite as much as on the destruction to which it leads. The very warning against evil may turn out to be in effect only a hint that it is readily accessible. One does not leave the candy box open beside the baby even if the infant has received the most explicit instructions as to the probable effect of too much sugar upon its tiny kidneys. Moreover, the knowledge of the prevalence of certain vices suggests to the youthful mind that what is so universal must also be rather excusable, or at least natural.
It seems to me that, while there is at present a greater popular knowledge of the high cost of sinning, there is at the same time a greater tolerance for sin itself. Certainly this is true among the people who make up the circle of my friends. "Wild oats" are regarded as entirely a matter of course. No anecdote is too broad to be told openly at the dinner table; in point of fact the stories that used to be whispered only very discreetly in the smoking room are now told freely as the natural relishes to polite conversation. In that respect things are pretty bad.
One cannot help wondering what goes on inside the villa on Rhode Island Avenue when the eighteen-year-old daughter of the house remarks to the circle of young men and women about her at a dance: "Well, I'm going to bed—seule!" The listener furtively speculates about mama. He feels quite sure about papa. Anyhow this particular mot attracted no comment. Doubtless the young lady was as far above suspicion as the wife of Caesar; but she and her companions in this particular set have an appalling frankness of speech and a callousness in regard to discussing the more personal facts of human existence that is startling to a middle-aged man like myself.
I happened recently to overhear a bit of casual dinner-table conversation between two of the gilded ornaments of the junior set. He was a boy of twenty-five, well known for his dissipations, but, nevertheless, regarded by most mothers as a highly desirable parti.
"Oh, yes!" he remarked easily. "They asked me if I wanted to go into a bughouse, and I said I hadn't any particular objection. I was there a month. Rum place! I should worry!"
"What ward?" she inquired with polite interest.
"Inebriates', of course," said he.
I am inclined to attribute much of the questionable taste and conduct of the younger members of the fast set to neglect on the part of their mothers. Women who are busy all day and every evening with social engagements have little time to cultivate the friendship of their daughters. Hence the girl just coming out is left to shift for herself, and she soon discovers that a certain risqué freedom in manner and conversation, and a disregard of convention, will win her a superficial popularity which she is apt to mistake for success.
Totally ignorant of what she is doing or the essential character of the means she is employing, she runs wild and soon earns an unenviable reputation, which she either cannot live down or which she feels obliged to live up to in order to satisfy her craving for attention. Many a girl has gone wrong simply because she felt that it was up to her to make good her reputation for caring nothing for the proprieties.
As against an increasing looseness in talk and conduct, it is interesting to note that heavy drinking is clearly going out of fashion in smart society. There can be no question as to that. My champagne bills are not more than a third of what they were ten years ago. I do not attribute this particularly to the temperance movement. But, as against eight quarts of champagne for a dinner of twenty—which used to be about my average when we first began entertaining in New York—three are now frequently enough. I have watched the butler repeatedly at large dinner parties as he passed the wine and seen him fill only four or five glasses.
Women rarely drink at all. About one man in three takes champagne. Of course he is apt to drink whisky instead, but by no means the same amount as formerly. If it were not for the convention requiring sherry, hock, champagne and liquors to be served the modern host could satisfy practically all the serious liquid requirements of his guests with a quart bottle of Scotch and a siphon of soda. Claret, Madeira, sparkling Moselles and Burgundies went out long ago. The fashion that has taught women self-control in eating has shown their husbands the value of abstinence. Unfortunately I do not see in this a betterment in morals, but mere self-interest—which may or may not be the same thing, according to one's philosophy. If a man drinks nowadays he drinks because he wants to and not to be a good fellow. A total abstainer finds himself perfectly at home anywhere.
Of course the fashionables, if they are going to set the pace, have to hit it up in order to head the procession. The fastness of the smart set in England is notorious, and it is the same way in France, Russia, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia—the world over; and as society tends to become unified mere national boundaries have less significance. The number of Americans who rent houses in London and Paris, and shooting boxes in Scotland, is large.
Hence the moral tone of Continental society and of the English aristocracy is gradually becoming more and more our own. But with this difference—that, as the aristocracy in England and Continental Europe is a separate caste, a well-defined order, having set metes and bounds, which considers itself superior to the rest of the population and views it with indifference, so its morals are regarded as more or less its own affair, and they do not have a wide influence on the community at large.
Even if he drinks champagne every night at dinner the Liverpool pickle merchant knows he cannot get into the king's set; but here the pickle man can not only break into the sacred circle, but he and his fat wife may themselves become the king and queen. So that a knowledge of how smart society conducts itself is an important matter to every man and woman living in the United States, since each hopes eventually to make a million dollars and move to New York. With us the fast crowd sets the example for society at large; whereas in England looseness in morals is a recognized privilege of the aristocracy to which the commoner may not aspire.
The worst feature of our situation is that the quasi-genteel working class, of whom our modern complex life supports hundreds of thousands—telephone operators, stenographers, and the like—greedily devour the newspaper accounts of the American aristocracy and model themselves, so far as possible, after it. It is almost unbelievable how intimate a knowledge these young women possess of the domestic life, manner of speech and dress of the conspicuous people in New York society.
I once stepped into the Waldorf with a friend of mine who wished to send a telephone message. He is a quiet, unassuming man of fifty, who inherited a large fortune and who is compelled, rather against his will, to do a large amount of entertaining by virtue of the position in society which Fate has thrust on him. It was a long-distance call.
"Who shall I say wants to talk?" asked the goddess with fillet-bound yellow hair in a patronizingly indifferent tone.
"Mr.–," answered my companion.
Instantly the girl's face was suffused with a smile of excited wonder.
"Are you Mr.–, the big swell who gives all the dinners and dances?" she inquired.
"I suppose I'm the man," he answered, rather amused than otherwise.
"Gee!" she cried, "ain't this luck! Look here, Mame!" she whispered hoarsely. "I've got Mr. – here on a long distance. What do you think of that!"
One cannot doubt that this telephone girl would unhesitatingly regard as above criticism anything said or done by a woman who moved in Mr. – 's circle. Unfortunately what this circle does is heralded in exaggerated terms. The influence of these partially true and often totally false reports is far-reaching and demoralizing.
The other day the young governess of a friend of my wife gave up her position, saying she was to be married. Her employer expressed an interest in the matter and asked who was going to perform the ceremony. She was surprised to learn that the functionary was to be the local country justice of the peace.
"But why aren't you going to have a clergyman marry you?" asked our friend.
"Because I don't want it too binding!" answered the girl calmly.
So far has the prevalence of divorce cast its enlightening beams.
* * * * *I have had a shooting box in Scotland on several different occasions; and my wife has conducted successful social campaigns, as I have said before, in London, Paris, Rome and Berlin. I did not go along, but I read about it all in the papers and received weekly from the scene of conflict a pound or so of mail matter, consisting of hundreds of diaphanous sheets of paper, each covered with my daughters' fashionable humpbacked handwriting. Hastings, my stenographer, became very expert at deciphering and transcribing it on the machine for my delectation.
I was quite confused at the number and variety of the titles of nobility with which my family seemed constantly to be surrounded. They had a wonderful time, met everybody, and returned home perfected cosmopolitans. What their ethical standards are I confess I do not know exactly, for the reason that I see so little of them. They lead totally independent lives.
On rare occasions we are invited to the same houses at the same time, and on Christmas Eve we still make it a point always to stay at home together. Really I have no idea how they dispose of their time. They are always away, making visits in other cities or taking trips. They chatter fluently about literature, the theater, music, art, and know a surprising number of celebrities in this and other countries—particularly in London. They are good linguists and marvelous dancers. They are respectful, well mannered, modest, and mildly affectionate; but somehow they do not seem to belong to me. They have no troubles of which I am the confidant.
If they have any definite opinions or principles I am unaware of them; but they have the most exquisite taste. Perhaps with them this takes the place of morals. I cannot imagine my girls doing or saying anything vulgar, yet what they are like when away from home I have no means of finding out. I am quite sure that when they eventually select their husbands I shall not be consulted in the matter. My formal blessing will be all that is asked, and if that blessing is not forthcoming no doubt they will get along well enough without it.
However, I am the constant recipient of congratulations on being the parent of such charming creatures. I have succeeded—apparently—in this direction as in others. Succeeded in what? I cannot imagine these girls of mine being any particular solace to my old age.
Recently, since writing these confessions of mine, I have often wondered why my children were not more to me. I do not think they are much more to my wife. I suppose it could just as well be put the other way. Why are we not more to them? It is because, I fancy, this modern existence of ours, where every function and duty of maternity—except the actual giving of birth—is performed vicariously for us, destroys any interdependence between parents and their offspring. "Smart" American mothers no longer, I am informed, nurse their babies. I know that my wife did not nurse hers. And thereafter each child had its own particular French bonne and governess besides.
Our nursery was a model of dainty comfort. All the superficial elegancies were provided for. It was a sunny, dustless apartment, with snow-white muslins, white enamel, and a frieze of grotesque Noah's Ark animals perambulating round the wall. There were huge dolls' houses, with electric lights; big closets of toys. From the earliest moment possible these three infants began to have private lessons in everything, including drawing, music and German. Their little days were as crowded with engagements then as now. Every hour was provided for; but among these multifarious occupations there was no engagement with their parents.
Even if their mother had not been overwhelmed with social duties herself my babies would, I am confident, have had no time for their parent except at serious inconvenience and a tremendous sacrifice of time. To be sure, I used occasionally to watch them decorously eating their strictly supervised suppers in the presence of the governess; but the perfect arrangements made possible by my financial success rendered parents a superfluity. They never bumped their heads, or soiled their clothes, or dirtied their little faces—so far as I knew. They never cried—at least I was never permitted to hear them.
When the time came for them to go to bed each raised a rosy little cheek and said sweetly: "Good night, papa." They had, I think, the usual children's diseases—exactly which ones I am not sure of; but they had them in the hospital room at the top of the house, from which I was excluded, and the diseases progressed with medical propriety in due course and under the efficient management of starchy trained nurses.
Their outdoor life consisted in walking the asphalt pavements of Central Park, varied with occasional visits to the roller-skating rink; but their social life began at the age of four or five. I remember these functions vividly, because they were so different from those of my own childhood. The first of these was when my eldest daughter attained the age of six years. Similar events in my private history had been characterized by violent games of blind man's buff, hide and seek, hunt the slipper, going to Jerusalem, ring-round-a-rosy, and so on, followed by a dish of ice-cream and hairpulling.
Not so with my offspring. Ten little ladies and gentlemen, accompanied by their maids, having been rearranged in the dressing room downstairs, were received by my daughter with due form in the drawing room. They were all flounced, ruffled and beribboned. Two little boys of seven had on Eton suits. Their behavior was impeccable.
Almost immediately a professor of legerdemain made his appearance and, with the customary facility of his brotherhood, proceeded to remove tons of débris from presumably empty hats, rabbits from handkerchiefs, and hard-boiled eggs from childish noses and ears. The assembled group watched him with polite tolerance. At intervals there was a squeal of surprise, but it soon developed that most of them had already seen the same trickman half a dozen times. However, they kindly consented to be amused, and the professor gave way to a Punch and Judy show of a sublimated variety, which the youthful audience viewed with mild approval.
The entertainment concluded with a stereopticon exhibition of supposedly humorous events, which obviously did not strike the children as funny at all. Supper was laid in the dining room, where the table had been arranged as if for a banquet of diplomats. There were flowers in abundance and a life-size swan of icing at each end. Each child was assisted by its own nurse, and our butler and a footman served, in stolid dignity, a meal consisting of rice pudding, cereals, cocoa, bread and butter, and ice-cream.
It was by all odds the most decorous affair ever held in our house. At the end the gifts were distributed—Parisian dolls, toy baby-carriages and paint boxes for the girls; steam engines, magic lanterns and miniature circuses for the boys. My bill for these trifles came to one hundred and twelve dollars. At half-past six the carriages arrived and our guests were hurried away.
I instance this affair because it struck the note of elegant propriety that has always been the tone of our family and social life. The children invited to the party were the little boys and girls whose fathers and mothers we thought most likely to advance their social interests later on.
Of these children two of the girls have married members of the foreign nobility—one a jaded English lord, the other a worthless and dissipated French count; another married—fifteen years later—one of these same little boys and divorced him within eighteen months; while two of the girls—our own—have not married.
Of the boys one wedded an actress; another lives in Paris and studies "art"; one has been already accounted for; and two have given their lives to playing polo, the stock market, and elevating the chorus.
* * * * *Beginning at this early period, my two daughters, and later on my son, met only the most select young people of their own age in New York and on Long Island. I remember being surprised at the amount of theatergoing they did by the time the eldest was nine years old. My wife made a practice of giving a children's theater party every Saturday and taking her small guests to the matinée. As the theaters were more limited in number then than now these comparative infants sooner or later saw practically everything that was on the boards—good, bad and indifferent; and they displayed a precocity of criticism that quite astounded me.
Their real social career began with children's dinners and dancing parties by the time they were twelve, and their later coming out changed little the mode of life to which they had been accustomed for several years before it. The result of their mother's watchful care and self-sacrifice is that these two young ladies could not possibly be happy, or even comfortable, if they married men unable to furnish them with French maids, motors, constant amusement, gay society, travel and Paris clothes.
Without these things they would wither away and die like flowers deprived of the sun. They are physically unfit to be anything but the wives of millionaires—and they will be the wives of millionaires or assuredly die unmarried. But, as the circle of rich young men of their acquaintance is more or less limited their chances of matrimony are by no means bright, albeit that they are the pivots of a furious whirl of gaiety which never stops.
No young man with an income of less than twenty thousand a year would have the temerity to propose to either of them. Even on twenty thousand they would have a hard struggle to get along; it would mean the most rigid economy—and, if there were babies, almost poverty.
Besides, when girls are living in the luxury to which mine are accustomed they think twice before essaying matrimony at all. The prospects of changing Newport, Palm Beach, Paris, Rome, Nice and Biarritz for the privilege of bearing children in a New York apartment house does not allure, as in the case of less cosmopolitan young ladies. There must be love—plus all present advantages! Present advantages withdrawn, love becomes cautious.
Even though the rich girl herself is of finer clay than her parents and, in spite of her artificial environment and the false standards by which she is surrounded, would like to meet and perhaps eventually marry some young man who is more worth while than the "pet cats" of her acquaintance, she is practically powerless to do so. She is cut off by the impenetrable artificial barrier of her own exclusiveness. She may hear of such young men—young fellows of ambition, of adventurous spirit, of genius, who have already achieved something in the world, but they are outside the wall of money and she is inside it, and there is no way for them to get in or for her to get out. She is permitted to know only the jeunesse dorée—the fops, the sports, the club-window men, whose antecedents are vouched for by the Social Register.
She has no way of meeting others. She does not know what the others are like. She is only aware of an instinctive distaste for most of the young fellows among whom she is thrown. At best they are merely innocuous when they are not offensive. They do nothing; they intend never to do anything. If she is the American girl of our plays and novels she wants something better; and in the plays and novels she always gets him—the dashing young ranchman, the heroic naval lieutenant, the fearless Alaskan explorer, the tireless prospector or daring civil engineer. But in real life she does not get him—except by the merest fluke of fortune. She does not know the real thing when she meets it, and she is just as likely to marry a dissipated groom or chauffeur as the young Stanley of her dreams.
