The Genius of America (collection)/The Shifting Centre of Morality
The Shifting Centre of Morality: a Study of the Vulgar Tongue
I say, beware of all enterprises that vequire new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to Sit? Uf you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes.
I do not mean to prescribe rules to strong and valiant natures, who will mind their own affairs whether in heaven or hell, and perchance build more magnificently end spend more lavishly than the richest, without over impoverishing themselves.
If Puritanism is, as I have been contending that it is, an essentially non-conforming spirit, then its most formidable adversary should be an essentially conforming spirit. And contrary to the general impression of the facts, the spirit in ouf present younger generation which is most deeply at variance with traditional Puritanism is not its sporadic rebelliousness but its prevailing readiness to conform. Current criticism, confining itself chiefly to manners and "minor morals" scents a revolt and a flying-off where a deeper consideration discovers rather a slavish conformity.
The social censors have been reporting lately, in high excitement, that our young people exhibit signs of moral deterioration, that they are already crowned with vine leaves and dancing like bacchants down the primrose way. When one corners a censor and demands point-blank what is wrong, one is not quite adequately answered. What one ordinarily receives is an impressionistic highly-colored account of the débutantes of the present year by a débutante of twenty-five years ago, who ejaculates her indignant "Why-my-dears!" over the vogue of rouge and jazz, the cigarettes and the cocktails, the partial emancipation of the lower (instead of only the upper) limbs, the unchaperoned drives by moonlight, and, in short, the extraordinary accessibility, the general "facility" of the buds. From among these ejaculations there emerges the central assurance of the censor, namely, that she was far, far more difficult to kiss than her neighbor's daughter is. An interesting contention, to which an enquirer of Hamlet's disposition will murmur: "Very like—Very like."
To indict an entire generation on specific charges of this sort is never very convincing. The débutantes who appear at their coming-out parties in bacchantic garb and manners are but an inconsiderable element even in that expensively fashionable set which the Sunday supplement recognizes as Society. And Society itself is but an inconsiderable element in the significant young life of any generation. A small group, flushed and festive, which loves to skirt the perilous verge of decorum, and hang a bit over the edge—such a group is always with us, as any one may easily persuade himself by turning the pages of his Juvenal or his Petrarch or even by running through the files of an illustrated New York weekly from 1860 to 1890. On the basis of rouge and "rag-time" and startling ups and downs of feminine apparel, the ultimate decline of civilization has probably been predicted every thirty years since the time of Queen Semiramis.
The historically-minded critic will be slow to assert that the manners and morals of our younger generation are, on the whole, any worse than those of the older generation, or any better. Yet he may still insist that they are significantly different. For the tendency of young people is to react against both the virtues and the defects of their elders. The father is a hard drinker but the son in disgust resolves not to touch a drop—that sometimes happens. Or the mother reads. The Ladies' Home Journal and the daughter The Liberator: that also happens. This sort of alternation is not invariable; yet, as we say, an excess in one direction tends to produce an excess in the opposite direction. And between one generation and the next morality does sometimes shift its centre.
Morality has two principal centres.
At one period, we have a morality of which the centre is within the individual. It works from within outward. It holds, like Christianity, that its prime concern is to touch the heart and quicken the conscience and give a right direction to the will. If the heart be right, say the exponents of this morality, right conduct will follow. One does not look to the world for approval; one endeavours to satisfy the inner monitor. One's own standards of right and wrong are more severe than anything that can be imposed from outside. Therefore one takes for a motto: "Trust thyself. To thine own self be true; thou canst not then be false to any man." If you get morality effectively planted at the centre of a man, he does right though no one is looking. He does right though the heavens fall.
The high tendency of this personal morality is to produce a man like Emerson, notable for independence, depth, poise, and serenity. Its low tendency is to produce a sentimentalist like Rousseau, whose "beautiful soul" is dissociated from his mundane and muddy behaviour.
At another period, we have a morality of which the centre is outside the individual. It is felt as a social pressure, working from without inward. It is primarily concerned, like ancient Judaism and like all systems of etiquette, with the regulation of extermal conduct and manners. When this type of morality predominates, if the actions of a man are right and his manners correct, no one worries much about the condition of his feelings. Act right and right feelings will follow; or if they don't, it doesn't much matter. The watch words are: "Do as the rest do. Conform to established ways. Follow the rules and regulations."
The high tendency of a purely social morality is to cultivate the graces and amenities, and so to produce an urbane and highly polished gentleman like Lord Chesterfield. Its low tendency is to finish the surfaces of character without touching the inward parts, so that the effect upon a sensitive observer, in the case of Talleyrand, was like that of "a silk stocking filled with mud." And an unfriendly critic remarked even of Chesterfield that he taught the "morals of a courtesan and the manners of a dancing master."
Yet let us not forget that this social morality has its merits. It has, above all, a definite method, a perfected technique, for laying hold of the raw uncultivated man and smoothing his surfaces and adjusting his external conduct to an external standard. Everyone has perhaps heard of that lady who always walked into church with such a heavenly smile about her lips that observers thought she must be meditating on some beatific vision, till a friend, more curious than the rest, asked her how she did it. She explained away the mystery by declaring that all she did was to shape her lips, when she entered the church door, as if she were about to utter the word "spruce." The sequel tells how the friend thought to beautify her own expression by the same technique; but she was stopped in the middle of the aisle and was asked in horror, by an acquaintance, what ailed her. She, much chagrined, explained that she was merely trying the formula which had made the beatific lady look so entrancing. "For heaven's sake," cried the neighbor, "what is it?" "Why," she replied, "as I come in the door, I simply shape my lips as if about to utter the word 'hemlock.'"
Both these ladies illustrate very well what I mean by the externality of the method.
At the present time, our ordinary young people are cultivating the external, the socially-centered type of morality. The individual would rather go wrong with the crowd than right by himself. He has a horror of being in any sense alone. He is almost painfully anxious to do as the rest do. Even his "eccentricities" are stereotyped and fashionable. He "revolts" by regiments. Three distinct forces tend to fortify this social morality in a position of predominance over the younger generation: popular philosophy, military discipline, and women.
In the first place, all the popular psychologists are physiologists, looking upon man as merely a nervous organism; and all the popular philosophers are pragmatists, behaviourists, etc., and occupy themselves with the actions and reactions, the responses and inhibitions of this nervous automaton. For them there is no spiritual centre. For them there is really no inside to personality. Everything is valued in terms of visible behaviour. Everything gets its meaning and significance in a network of external relations. Intelligently or otherwise, our young people seize upon current philosophy to help them construct an entire universe for themselves which shall have no "insides." In the violence of their reaction against the idealism and inwardness of their fathers, they rejoice in their intention of living on the surface of things. They will get rid of what their fathers called sin by getting rid of what their fathers called the soul.
The heroine of current fiction has no soul—she has not even a heart; she has only a nervous system. She has no spiritual crises—she has not even emotional crises; she has only nervous reactions. Our popular novelists—our Floyd Dells and Rose Macauleys, and W. L. Georges and Sinclair Lewises and McFees—never present their heroines in the grip of any such grand passions as shattered the heroines of the Brontë sisters. And yet these modern young women go through far more experiences than Charlotte Brontë ever dreamed it possible for any girl to have. Experiences which would have made the whole of life for Jane Eyre, experiences which would have raised her to rapture or cast her into the nethermost hell,—our modern heroine goes through these at a week-end, and brushes them aside "without batting an eyelid"—as she would say.
The philosophic movement towards an "external" moral centre has doubtless been greatly accelerated by a second force the full consequences of which we are just beginning to feel. It is hardly questionable that army discipline and, perhaps even more, the immense "drives" to which we were subjected in our recent embattled period did much towards establishing in the younger generation its profound deference for this external morality. We hear much about the few dissenters who did not subscribe nor conform, and we hear much about the many honest patriots who did subscribe and conform. But we have had very little study of the effect of military discipline and "drives" upon the vast intermediate mass of unformed plastic young people, practically destitute of individual convictions, who were equipped overnight, by a power not themselves, with uniform convictions and uniform conduct with respect to all manner of subjects which they had never considered.
That abrupt and convulsive shifting of responsibility for belief and conduct from the individual to an organized power outside the individual had its great merits. It frequently clothed the stark naked. But like the asylum that receives the pauper, like the infallible and amniscient church that embraces a thinking soul, it had compensations which were dangers. If you were not in a position of leadership, you had to initiate and decide nothing. You did what the rest did; and you were "all right." Your scruples were cancelled with a rubber stamp. If doubts pursued you, you took refuge in the crowd, which covered you and shaped you. And you quite forget that old individualistic maxim: "We sink as easily as we rise through our sympathies."
How the newly augmented powers of women and their quickened class consciousness will affect the situation in the future remains to be seen; but all experience indicates that these new powers and this quickened class consciousness will tend to fortify the alliance of popular philosophy and military discipline against a personal and internally centered morality. Women in masses are, or always have been, servile under the tyranny of social opinion, and subject to a very gross superstition. Whenever two or three of them are gathered together, the great goddess. They is in the midst of them with Her arrogant foot on their necks. There is no woman's club or tea or sewing circle or even domestic fireside where Her voice is not heard and where Her words are not solemnly quoted as oracles, ending with absolute finality all masculine dissent.
It is perhaps within the domestic circle that the tyranny of this deity is most ruthlessly imposed and substituted for the free and natural dictates of the private heart. I will illustrate the procedure. The average man might conceivably dispute, let us assume, with his own wife on fairly equal terms. He has devoted the better part of a lifetime to studying her special tactics and strategems, and knows how to meet them. But the average man is never permitted by a really intelligent wife to carry on any dispute with her. The moment that he begins an argument she softly steps aside—or more accurately, side-steps—and "quotes Scripture," quotes this Hydra-headed monster, Whom it is sacrilege to mention by any other designation than the capitalized third person plural.
At the domestic fireside, argument, as distinguished from conviction, usually begins in a man's soul. In the intimate simplicity of his heart, moved only by considerations of comfort, personal taste, or the family budget, a man will begin thus:
"I believe, Dorothy, we'd better have another electric light put in the dining room, so that we can see a little better what we are taking in."
She will reply: "Oh, no, my dear; we'll do nothing of the sort. They are using candles now."
Or he will begin: "Well, Dotty old dear, I guess the old car will serve us another season, won't it?"
And she: "Why, John, how can you think so? It's quite impossible. They are using closed cars now."
Or the poor man will open a fireside rumination thus: "Do you know, Dorothy, when Kitty's in high school"
And she will cut in: "But Kitty is not going to the high school. You are absurd. You know perfectly well that. They are sending. Their girls away to shool now."
Such are the interventions of the great goddess They, trampling rough-shod over the inclinations and powers of the private life. And such is the worship of her, instituted daily on a more and more imposing scale as a large class of timid idolaters becomes a potent organized force in the determination of standards.
Under the combined pressure of philosophy, military discipline, and feminine superstition, the younger generation has been driven to conceive of virtue as merely a facile adjustment to the existing environment. It believes to an excessive degree in certain "standardized" ways of making the adjustment. The resulting phenomena have their comic aspects and their grave aspects, which I shall now explore a little according to a method suggested by this profound aphorism of Stevenson's: "Man lives not by bread alone; but mostly by catchwords." All that is most efficacious in the morality of our time is condensed in its catchwords. I shall hunt for the missing soul of the younger generation by following the bits of slang it has dropped in its flight.
"Abandon hope of social success," I read in an organ of youth a few months ago, "unless you have a car and a 'line.'" For days I enquired in vain of my coevals the meaning of the world 'line.' But the moment I asked a young man of the new times whether he understood it, he laughed, and explained that a 'line' is a complete set of conversational openings and ready-to-wear speeches, practically committed to memory and rehearsed for use on all typical social occasions. If you have a 'line,' you are not at a loss when the door opens, or in the ten minutes' talk with the family or the chaperone, or at any of the difficult transitional moments in your Napoleonic progress from the first dance to the last goodnight.
"It is all right," said my informant, "if you don't go to the same place too often."
I mused on a number of things of which I had read or heard, including the training of a successful bookagent, before I thought of the obvious solution. Then I said: "It sounds like F. Scott Fitzgerald."
"It is like him," he replied. "They all study his stuff—get it by heart. He has the best 'line' going."
I ended my lesson with the understanding that 'line' is short for lifeline, a device by which one avoids the danger of misstepping into the deep water which R. L. Stevenson commended to a former generation of students as "truth of intercourse."
This self-distrust of the new generation, this clinging to the social lifeline, this reliance upon external means of grace, is not confined to undergraduates. It pervades the younger society. It is openly recognized and played upon, for instance, in those popular and entertaining magazines which undertake to teach the newly-rich to spend their money as if they had been rich a long time. "Buy a car," advises a canny caterer to democracy, "which will give you that comfortable sense of superiority." O superlative car! "Here are garments," cries another, "which will put you perfectly at ease in any society." O magical garments! Finally consider a full-page advertisement (in a radical journal which scoffs at decorum) of a book on etiquette, running about like this: "If you spilled a plate of soup in the lap of your hostess, should you apologize profusely, or should you pass over the incident in silence?—Buy this book and find out."
If that old censor of social morals, Thoreau, could visit us and inspect these pages, one can imagine him muttering in his Diogenes' beard: "Could not a man who really possessed 'a comfortable sense of superiority'—could he not walk? or, if necessary, consider buying a car within his means and adequate to his needs? wear his clothes till they were easy? and, when he spilled the soup, speak what words of consolation God put into his heart?" But Thoreau was of a former generation which sought its comfortable sense of superiority within, rather than in that "ceaseless striving after smartness in clothing," observed by William McFee's London sailor lad as a distinction of the New York man-in-the-street.
Ten thousand finger-posts point the younger generation the way to enter the race for external "distinction," the way to Vanity Fair—ten thousand finger-posts to one honest old-fashioned pilgrim who assures them that it is the privilege of the truly superior man to do what he pleases and what suits his own sense of fitness, simply and nonchalantly. How do heroes converse? "Won't you have a cup of tea?" says King Haakon. "By George, your Majesty," says Mr. Roosevelt, "the very thing I'd like!" You won't find that reply in any book of etiquette; yet it suited the occasion well enough. In general those who always stand on their dignity have nothing else to stand on. It is not the prime minister but the secretarial underlings who step starchily out in frock coats and top hats. Their chief bolts from his office in sack coat and nondescript felt. He has risen above his tailor.
Carlyle had a contemptuous word for all that "superiority" which one can buy at the store: he called it "gigmanity." It is a word that should be taught to our young people as a charm against infatuation with the external show of things. Carlyle found his word in the records of a criminal case. Said a witness; "I have always considered the defendant a respectable man." "What do you mean, sir," queries the judge, "by a respectable man?" "Why, your honor," replied the witness, "he keeps a gig." We have substituted for the gig a more elaborate vehicle in which one may ride to respectability—a very smooth-riding vehicle which to be perfectly respectable, should be equipped, according to current standards, with a lap-robe of Chinese civet cat lined with velvet, and an electrically lighted accessories case of gold and pearl.
But consider now a little more closely the young person who expects to be put at ease by a car, a suit of clothes, and a book of etiquette—all of which he recognizes as superior to himself. Follow him to college, whither he is sure to be impelled by his self-distrust and his naïve confidence in a prescribed routine. No organ within him craves intellectual food; but something without him, a continuous social whisper has suggested that there is salvation in a bachelor's degree. College life is a kind of select soirée, at which it will give him 'a comfortable sense of superiority' merely to be seen. By him we explain why academic culture does not "take." With him in our eye, we expound a curious phrase in wide use among undergraduates.
Every year I talk with a considerable number of young persons, about to enter the junior and senior classes, concerning their program of studies; and I regularly begin by asking what they are doing in certain prescribed subjects, such as foreign languages. Quite regularly seven out of ten of them answer, with a happy smile and a reminiscent sigh: "Thank goodness, I worked off my French and German last year."
To which I regularly and hopelessly retort: "But have you worked up your German? Have you worked in your French? We don't require you to take them for the look of the thing. Can you use them?"
And they quite regularly respond: "Oh, no! We don't expect to use them. We merely took them to work off group-requirements."
My feigned surprise that they should think us here "for the look of the thing" is an echo, by the way, of Mr. Kipling, who as much as any living writer, gave the tone to undergraduate life twenty years ago. Under the spur of his Indian tales and verse, we talked a good deal in those times about doing the "day's work" without excuses. It was the mode then to admire "men who do things." And so our blood was stirred by Mr. Kipling's hard-mouthed bridge-builder haranguing his shiftless Hindus: "Sons of unthinkable begetting, children of unspeakable shame! Are we here for the look of the thing?"
It is at least twenty years since I read that passage; and yet it vibrates still in the memory with an authority which nothing of Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald's quite possesses. I will present, on the other hand, a bit of recent dialogue from life, which sounds in my ears like a current tune, expressing the spirit of a new generation which candidly admits that it is here "for the look of the thing."
At registration time in the fall a very sweet girl from Georgia with a soft southern voice and soft southern eyes, fringed like jessamine or honeysuckle, came to me as registration officer, and asked me to waive a college rule in her favor.
"I am very sorry," I said, with customary mild severity, "I can't let you do it. I have no authority in the matter."
"Well," she replied, "who has? Who can?" And she looked into my eyes with searching and almost painful sweetness.
"You might," I said, faltering, "you might go to the Dean. A Dean is the only one that breaks rules. You might ask him, but I doubt if it will do you any good. Our Dean is a very firm man. He's a New Englander, you know, a Puritan, with a stiff conscience."
"Tell me something," she said softly, "will you?"
"Yes," I replied, "if I can." I was ready to do anything for her, short of breaking the rule.
"Is this Dean of yours a bachelor or a married man?"
"A bachelor," I answered, "a bachelor of forty."
"Oh, that's all right," she cried gaily, as she gathered up her papers, "I'll fix him."
If, now, you take the spirit of this fair Georgian and mold it a little under the pressures of the hour, you produce an outstanding type of the recent feminine "arrivals" in business. She will get on. If she had a shade less of adaptability and a shade more of "soul," she would have her difficulties.
I had recently an instructive conversation with a charming and thoroughly refined young woman, who, moved by the impulse of her time, was seeking "economic independence," and had taken her initial steps in the business world. I asked her what she had learned from her professional life. "The most important thing that I have tried to learn," she replied instantly but without much gusto, "is how to sell myself."
I wish I could say that the vile phrase struck me as shocking. But how can one be shocked any longer, whose ears have rung these half-dozen years with phrases struck at the same mint, "slogans" of the "nation-wide" "campaigners," "selling charity," "selling art," "selling the war," "selling patriotism," "selling the flag," "selling the church—yours in business for the Lord," "selling" things visible and things invisible, whatever is now for sale in the heavens above or the waters under the earth—and everything is for sale. Such is the idiom of their souls.
At the present moment "production" is looked upon as an undertaking for old men. Salesmanship is the one career that kindles the imaginations and genius of the young. It is a perfectly respectable career for one who has something valuable to sell.
We touch now on what is most dangerously wrong in the moral incentives and tendencies of the younger generation. Its one categorical imperative, "Learn to sell yourself," means, being interpreted, "Get your value recognized by society." Publicity managers, business psychologists, sales-engineers, and their kind and kindred, who are legion, have made the atmosphere of our times tense with pressures upon every young person to get his value recognized. If a new popular religion were founded to-day, the first book of its gospel would undoubtedly treat of the psychology of salesmanship. The spirit of this gospel has already invaded the void left by the new universe constructed with no "insides." The young person responds with an intoxication, seldom sobered by any consideration whatever of the really quite primary questions whether he has any value, and, if not, whether by dint of some old-fashioned exertion, he may acquire some. The emphasis of the selling-slogan is, at least for a young generation, off: it just misses the head of the nail and strikes with a resounding whack close beside it. Only the attentive notice that it is all noise with no honest drive.
The young person who is inspired to "sell" himself is encouraged by every pressure of his times to concern himself with only one thing, namely, "How to put it across." He hears on all sides that what he is to put across is of small consequence. He need not give himself much anxiety, if he is a teacher or preacher about what he is to teach or preach; nor, if he is a journalist or author or artist, about what he is to write or paint.
Efficiency in a universe of salesmen demands no special training or learning in any field whatever, save one—the technique of "touch." If you haven't the touch, you are "Out." If you have the "touch," you are "It." This technique is heaven's free gift to the happy mortal who is born "a good mixer," facile and suave in surface contacts. But it is also masterable by those unintrospective wits, who, wasting no time in meditating either their subject or their object, consider only their "objective," and therefore dedicate their days and their nights to the study of their public, their audience, their clientele.
Learned men in the universities are rapidly establishing the "technique of touch" on universal principles, applicable to all relations between the salesman and the public, from the marketing of short stories to transactions in gold brick. When this new science is perfected, it bids fair to displace ethics, logic, and the other elements of our bankrupt philosophy. For those who have acquired the new learning, those who have the "touch," prosper. They "get away with it." They "put it across."
Under the new system, success in life is felicitously described as "getting by." This mudest expression indicates that our hero, though slightly elated by his efficiency, is no enthusiast. He is, on the contrary, just beneath his fine surface, a cynic. Knowing the hollowness of his interior, he does not respect himself. Suspecting that those with whom he traffics are equally hollow, he does not respect his public. His criterion of success implies acknowledgment that he is a fraud and his public a fool, who will pass him without challenge provided only that he "puts up a good front." It is understood that I am portraying one whom the "band-wagon" carries to the end of the road.
When I seek for an incarnate symbol of what the virtues of our young generation become when they are pushed to excess, I recall one of its representatives who burst upon us one summer evening in a crowded train coming out of Washington. We were standing, some twenty of us, tired and hungry, jammed in the hot throat of the dining-car, waiting earnestly yet orderly for our turn at a seat. Just as one was vacated, in from the next coach dashed a youth of twenty-one, immaculate in white flannels, chin aloft and eyes hard ahead, like a picture drawn in the old days by Mr. C. D. Gibson for the late R. H. Davis. With a perfectly lordly gesture of the hand, as of one clearing the way for Rupert of Hentzau, and with a quiet but imperative "I beg your pardon," that handsome, that plausible, youth actually tried to break through the wedge of those twenty weary mortals and take that seat for himself. Shameful to relate, the wedge melted before him; he got by—almost to the head of the line, before an iron arm barred the passage, and a firm humorous voice exclaimed: "No, you don't, my boy! You'll have to work your way up, like the rest of us." Whereat that immaculate young importance, instantly collapsing, slunk and wriggled to the rear, while the twenty murmured to one another, "Where did he get that stuff?"
My illustrative personage, real and at the same time symbolical, obviously got his "stuff" from a society excessively dependent for its superiority upon car-makers, tailors, and books of etiquette. The morality of his period has worked upon my hero from without inward, but has not penetrated far. At the center, where the master should sit, there is a space without form and void. He has nothing, morally speaking, of his own. The time-spirit has clothed him in specious appearances. He travels upon credit which was accumulated in other days, when the Gibson chin was the outward sign of an inward determination. He is, therefore, in the figurative, and probably also in the literal, sense, "living beyond his means."
I will hazard a guess that at college he studied a "line," "worked off" his French, and attained in his studies a passing mark, which is now generally known as a "gentleman's grade." At the same time he lived softly in a palatial fraternity house contributed by over indulgent alumni, who themselves paid for their barracks accommodations in the old dormitory by tending furnaces, and the like. He had had his father's car at his disposal since his early 'teens. Naturally when he went to college, he required it still for transit from fraternity house to class room and for dances and week-end parties. Of course, if one has a good car, one must live up to one's car.
And so the Old Man, half in pity for his own austere youth, saw his son through in a style that he did not allow himself after a life-time of industry and thrift. "When my boy gets out in the world," the Old Man had said, "he'll have to shift for himself; but we'll give him a start with the best of them. Yes, sir, with the best of them!"
I will guess also that our young man is now in the employ of a corporation with very handsome offices, which gives him an apprentice's wage, sufficient to pay installments on his tailor's bill, while it authorizes an expense account allowing and encouraging him to enjoy the clubs, hotels, and costly little pleasures of big business men. All his life he has had unearned advantages thrust upon him; he takes them quite as a matter of course. He has always spent other people's money freely. Now it is a matter of duty to put on all the "side" that he can. He must eat and dress and drive in a fashion to "get in touch" with men whose income tax many times exceeds his income. Under the circumstances, it is altogether too soon to think of laying anything by. If he attempted that, he would have to "drop out of the running." He has, however, "invested" in an automobile, upholstered with the elegance of a parlor, and is asking his landlord to trust him for the last month's rent.
If he "puts it across" to a girl, formed on the same system—as I think he soon will—she, in—her turn, will clutch at the "line" she has been taught. She will demand the right to be married without a ring, to retain her own name, to be secure from the expectation of children, to be allowed to pursue her own career, and to be guaranteed a "good time." To all of which demands he will yield ready assent. They will have a highly expensive engagement and a still more expensive wedding and honeymoon; and they will then attempt to "jolly things along" together.
They will find that they are unable to keep house comfortably in his upholstered car. He will discover that a modern establishment for two is, in spite of all that our grandmothers used to say, more difficult to swing than bachelor's quarters. It will appear that she is quite his equal as a spender. At first he may hope for some relief from the proceeds of that independent career which he has agreed to allow her to pursue. But he will learn very shortly that the kind of girl who stipulates for a marriage exempt from all the responsibilities of the traditional union becomes the kind of wife who puts all that she can lay hands on upon her own back, and yet leaves it more than half uncovered. She has been trained to dress and display herself for the kind of man that he is. But he is not quite equal to the task of maintaining the kind of a woman that she is. In two years or less, he will be single again and bankrupt—or an advertising manager on twenty thousand a year.
I add the alternative; because he may "get by." But a generation with a marked tendency towards the production and heroization of such figures and figurantes should beware of pressing its tendencies too far. "The gods creep up on feet of wool." A spending generation which trades on the moral and material accumulations of its predecessors, presently finds its stock exhausted. And though for a time, by its mastery of "touch" it may still sell water and market wind, in the long run it will not get by with that stuff.