The Genius of America (collection)/The Superior Class
The Superior Class
Nothing is more deeply punished than the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by others' eyes.
That which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the good humor and hilarity they exhibit.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism, and enable us to see other people and their works.
Every one who reflects concludes that the welfare of society depends upon its management by superior persons. The thoughtful democrat does not object to hereditary aristocracies because they perpetuate the management of superior persons. He objects because in the long run they allow unenergetic incompetents to remain in office and manage, while able men cool their shins in the corridor. In sixteenth century England, when knighthood was still in late autumnal flower, an aristocratic author maintained, apparently with full conviction, that one of noble blood sits his horse and conducts himself in all manly exercises with a grace beyond the reach of the common man. But in the seventeenth century it appears that the noble blood had ceased to transmit its virtues; for a writer on etiquette of that period warns gentlemen that they should never enter any athletic competition with yokels unless they are sure that they can excel. From that time on, the hereditary principle began to be supplanted by another method for attaining the same indispensable object.
Democracy, politically or socially considered, is a method of recruiting a superior class. To—this end democracy institutes a kind of Olympic contest, inviting all who think themselves athletes to contend for renown. The moment one regards the matter in this light it becomes manifestly absurd to say because democracy admits all corners to her contests that she has no standards. The theory is, on the contrary, that precisely because she admits all corners she can put her standards very high. Two sects of unbelievers chiefly oppose and attempt to thwart her central purpose: First, those who wish the hurdles lowered and the pace slowed so that all who enter may cross the tape together. Second, those who, reviving the abrogated hereditary principle, seek to disqualify new competitors by the introduction of standards irrelevant to the object of the competition, as if one should say, "No one may enter the Marathon who does not pronounce his final r's as they do on Commonwealth Avenue."
With the rapidly enlarging feminine influence in American life certain questions are thrust upon the student of democracy. Will women, as they have promised, raise our essential standards? Will they constitute an effective increment to the superior class? Or will their long enjoyment of "special privilege" render difficult an adjustment to their mere "rights?" Will they have the courage to contend on really equal terms for a share in the social estate which democracy is ever bent upon repartitioning, or will they warily intrigue for the disqualification of all contestants who are not of a certified "gigmanity"?
My own observation is that in the modern woman much more distinctly than in the modern man a bold imagination is still ineffectually struggling with a timorous intelligence. This is particularly true of those women in the "sheltered class," who are grouped by a writer in the New York Times with the Southern peasantry and the Northern foreign-born as requiring an education for the ballot. Not wishing to dogmatize, an objectionable and irritating masculine habit, I will take an illustrative case. I will take the case of a writer of talent, Mrs. Katherine Fullerton Gerould, who has distinguished herself both as a skilful concocter of the American short story, which we are told is the best in the world, and as a producer of critical essays of a remarkable tartness, dealing with men, manners, morals, and religion. In her fiction, imagination has the victory; in her essays, the timorous intelligence. To turn from the fiction to the essays affords a contrast as beguiling as to watch an agile performer on the stage who appears at one moment as a Long John Silver, walks behind a screen, and reappears a moment later as Lydia Languish.
As a writer of short stories Mrs. Gerould plays the part of a man in a world of men with fine bravado, only occasionally reminding one of Rosalind's remark, that doublet and hose must show itself courageous to petticoat. She owes something of her outfit to Mrs. Wharton, something to Henry James, and perhaps still more to Mr. Kipling of the Indian tales. A half-dozen of her best performances—for examples, "Vain Oblations," "The Miracle," "Wesendonck," and "The Weaker Vessel"—are as good as anybody's, originally conceived and brilliantly executed. They have taken shape in an emancipated and unabashed imagination, which constructs moral predicaments of high tension and probes with merciless artistic delight into possibilities that are sometimes to the last degree horrid and indeed almost insufferably revolting. Her studiously nonchalant manner enhances the effect of her matter. She presents the discoveries of her imagination with firm objectivity in a style terse, elliptical, mannish, like a travelled clubman back from the heart of Africa relating his adventures to other clubmen who have also been in Africa. Her book on Hawaii is written without this literary mask and contains, as I remember, a sigh or so in the character of Rosalind. Yet venturous curiosity is the dominant note; and one feels, when reading the account of the leper colony and the orgiastic native dances, that the author, like many highly refined ladies, might be prevailed upon, if properly chaperoned, to join a Senegalese headhunt, as a spectator, or to knit a scarf, like Dickens's French women, at the foot of a revolutionary place of justice.
Then the bold teller of tales disappears behind the screen to reappear in her recent volume of essays, Modes and Morals, as an excessively feminine "particular person" with a soul formed on old mahogany and blue china, with a rather vacuous, old-fashioned New Englandish cant about "high-thinking" and "intellectual values," with an obviously sincere attachment to parlormaids and "nice things," and with an overwhelming fear that in the widening social democracy of these times some bounder who says "don't" for "doesn't" may leap the barrier inclosing those who say "doesn't" and dine with a friend or relative in the superior class—with possible matrimonial consequences quite too dreadful to contemplate. I have only begun in this long sentence to enumerate Mrs. Gerould's trepidations. She fears the world she lives in and pretty much all its works and ways. Her fundamental and controlling fear is due to "the increased hold of the democratic fallacy on the public mind." She fears materialism. She has also a great horror of science. She is afraid of new races and the influx of an inferior population which will basely compromise with mission furniture and domestic rugs. She apprehends that these forces will extirpate something precious which she calls "culture."
I relish, as I have intimated, the style and the æsthetically applied splashes of barbaric color in her stories. No one paints better than she the beautiful wife in one of our best families, pacing restlessly across a Chinese rug under tall windows through floods of glowing sunlight, meditating an elopement, but restrained by those delicacies of feeling which, as every one knows, are developed by living amid priceless old Chippendale. I enjoy so much the bravado of her stories that I hesitate to say how deeply I have been shocked by the pusillanimity of her essays and by the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the class to which they are presumably designed to bring comfort and aid.
So far as I am concerned, however, the offence has been committed, and I am willing, if it is possible, to turn my discomfiture to some public profit. "By suffering we learn," says the Greek dramatist; and out of our suffering, one may add, we teach. I happen to be interested in public instruction, being associated with one of those State universities which, as many of us believe, are in a fair way to fufill to the people the promises which Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln saw in American life. Let the general reader fancy, then, my embarrassment when I found Mrs. Gerould declaring with emphasis that in the matter of education "we cannot count on the West to help us, for the West is cursed with State universities." Mrs. Gerould cannot, of course, have intended any incivility here. She is a writer of the most correct taste and complete decorum. The fault was, in a sense, my own, for I had—inadvertently, to be sure—intruded upon, or, as we sometimes say in our brutal Western fashion, "butted into," a kind of boudoir chat of the author with her confidential friends. And yet I cannot help feeling—it is a palliative to my mortification—that Mrs. Gerould was in some slight degree responsible for my unhappy gaucherie. She might, so to speak, have taken the precaution of drawing the curtains and closing the door.
Embarrassed as I was by overhearing her confidential opinions of the West and its universities, I was even more acutely perturbed by another matter. I felt quite indecently out of place and ruddy with shame at having thrust myself into the private circle to which alone she must have desired to communicate her views of Miss Alcott's New England and the culture of Concord. Like many Americans, whether still dwelling in adorable nooks where their ancestors settled two hundred years ago, or whethei scattered across the plains or among the Sierras or up and down the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, I feel a mysterious and almost passionate tenderness for New England. Wherever the sons and daughters of her spirit may sojourn or wander New England still pulls at their hearts as their motherland. With her exquisite white villages, clustering around the white church spire, under the maples and the pure blue heaven, between overshadowing hills, she flashes upon the inward eye, in smoky city or southwestern desert, as a vision of home—the historic home.
There rest from their labors seven or eight generations of simple, pious folk, who, toiling from sunrise to sunset, brought the forlorn hope of their time to reluctant blossom and explored the difficult meaning of a new world—small independent farmers who lived on the land, skilled workmen who did not watch the clock, the doctor who cared more for his patient than for his fee, and the minister passing rich on six hundred dollars a year.
For one reason or another these provincial folk—it must be remembered that the Adamses now declare even Boston provincial—these provincial folk, as all our fashionable anti-Puritan writers are complaining, showed a marked indifference to the more expensive pleasures of the senses. I sometimes gravely doubt whether it is true, as is often asserted, that they did not care for beauty. They had, for example, a kind of native instinct for beautiful and sound woodwork. Urbane people of more taste than means are still combing the clocks, highboys, and sideboards out of the remoter hill villages of New England. Still it probably is true that they gave comparatively little attention to the decoration of their homes or to the adornment of their persons. By virtue or by necessity they dispensed with silk next the skin and with many other things soft, bright, and luxurious which a really nice person to-day can hardly do without. If one does without them one ceases, as Mrs. Gerould intimates, to be nice. The cost of being nice is going up. Thence the shadow of dread which overspreads us. Thence our present misery. Few of us are able to keep our bodies in the style to which our imaginations are accustomed.
With New Englanders of the older culture the case was different. Perhaps nature meant more to them and manufactured articles less. Perhaps the fine, clear air of their Doric villages, and beauty that walks abroad in their mountains and runs down their brooks and breaks like a dryad, an incarnate Spring, from the bark of their white birches in April—perhaps this order of beauty in 1840 more fully slakedthe thirst of the soul than it does nowadays. Perhaps in 1840 a philosopher living by Walden Pond on thirty dollars a year really found beauty of a sort in a plain and sound integrity within. Perhaps Alcott and Thoreau and Emerson did actually value high thinking and veritably did rate their daily conversation with Plato, Hafiz, and Confucius above tea-table gossip. Miss Alcott's New England remains precious to us and Concord is still a sacred place in the memory, because there the people who talked about "intellectual values" meant what they were saying. When they renounced "high living" they renounced it for themselves, and not merely for tradespeople and artisans.
But now comes Mrs. Gerould and, having reread Miss Alcott's books in the light of our new and modern culture, intimates that it doesn't much matter what these people meant, since they were outside the pale, since they were, in fact, "underbred." In the first place, they were too poor to be otherwise. Secondly, "breeding," as such, is simply not a product of the independent village. The "friends of Emerson," she declares, lacked the gift of "civilized contacts." Thirdly, they said "don't" for "doesn't" and neglected the subjunctive mood. Fourthly, their parties were not properly chaperoned. Fifthly, their scholarliness was "bigoted" and they exhibited an underbred interest in education, such as, Mrs. Gerould supposes, can be matched to-day "only in the Middle West." Sixthly, they were "blatantly moral"—a really nice person in our day may be religious, but to be moral is a little quaint. Seventhly, they showed their underbreeding by their patriotism—a coarse note. Eighthly, their dress, household service, and furniture were bad, and, what was infinitely worse, "they did not know it." Really nice people to-day live and have their being in a consciousness of their furniture, their household service, and their dress. Ninthly, and lastly, and most confidentially, "you really would not want to spend a week in the house of any one of them."
This bill of indictment was clearly intended for the ears of a superior class or a coterie superior to the Emersonian circle. We aristocrats, suggests Mrs. Gerould, must make a stand for culture; we must get together and exclude both the dead and the living whose furniture does not come up to our standards and who have not mastered the subjunctive mood. Now, to take this line is going to hurt Mrs. Gerould's popularity with the great majority who have not heard of the subjunctive. It is going to have a very estranging effect upon the masses of Americans who still cling to fumed oak. This is of no consequence to her. She definitely and defiantly announces that she wishes to draw apart, that her faith and her fun depend upon the preservation of "caste and class and clan." But it is of consequence to a major democratic interest which all sorts of common people have at heart. It is of interest to the cause of culture, which is in danger of being mortally wounded in the house of its professed friends. Mrs. Gerould injures the cause of culture by identifying it with social superciliousness and by representing it as something to be made a clan monopoly. She injures its reputation still more by an extraordinary overemphasis of external advantages which a thief may carry off in the night and by an equally extraordinary neglect of those internal advantages which are as inaccessible to the thief as the love of God.
In the New Jerusalem every woman of culture, perhaps,—every really nice woman—will have a huddle of colored servants on the stairs of her mansion and well-trained parlormaids hovering in the halls, dusting the Chinese Chippendale, cleaning the Bokhara rugs, and opening the door to the members of the superior class. But in this world a good many women of culture will continue to prove their amenity, as they have always done, primarily by more strictly personal graces of mind and heart. Among these graces not least is the gift of not seeing what ought not to be seen. I should suppose that, in the presence of Miss Alcott's courage and gayety, a really opulent culture might have thrown a cloak of invisibility, which is much like the cloak of charity, over that dress of hers, which would otherwise remind us that she made it herself and none too well.
But a culture which goes deep as the heart has a certain "levelling" and democratical tendency. Therefore Mrs. Gerould declares with a bang that "culture is not a democratic achievement, because culture is inherently snobbish." She believes in the thing—it becomes a thing by her definitions—but she also believes that there is not enough of the thing to go around. Accordingly, she trusts that the numbers of those who aspire to it will be kept down. She says that she pins her hope of effective restriction on the older Eastern universities and the choice minority. Apparently they are to coöperate with her in reducing the wages of the skilled workman, who is now beginning to be able to send his son to one of the accursed State universities and to provide for his family some of the external means of grace the lack of which made the Alcotts so "underbred." Since the majority will not value a minority engaged in closing the door in its face, she insists that the minority must unite to value itself. Clearly such a minority as she contemplates can have no value but to itself. Here is "aristocracy" in the last despairing gasps of self-consumption.
Emerson and Matthew Arnold in their day were often thought to be "tainted with aristocratic principles." But place their idea of culture beside Mrs. Gerould's and instantly you would take those prophets for demagogues, flatterers of the "rascal many." They were not, at any rate, afraid of their world. And they did not pretend that what they prescribed for the superior class would destroy the multitude. Culture they conceived of as the steadily strengthening bond between man and man in an ever larger and larger company able to satisfy its standards. For they conceived of culture not! as a thing, but as an enlightened and enlightening spirit, a spirit of wide embrace, exacting in its discipline, but like the great historic Church of Christendom, of catholic and charitable imagination, eager to enfold a converted world and, so, eminently adapted to the democratic societies of the future.
It is thirty years since I read Miss Alcott's stories and I doubt whether I should enjoy them now as much as I enjoy Mrs. Gerould's. But there is a charm in certain pages of her Journal, an "amenity," of an order which I seek in vain in the far more clever works of her successor to my admiration. When Bronson Alcott, returning from his western lecturing tour, presented himself late at night to his poverty stricken family, they flew down the stairs, wife and four girls, in their night wear, to meet him. (A well-bred person would, of course, have sent one of her huddle of colored servants.) The philosopher presented himself somewhat apologetically, confessing that he had lost his overcoat and that his net profits had amounted to only one dollar. Mrs. Alcott, that underbred woman, kissed the old sage affectionately and said: "I think you did very well indeed, dear." And they all trooped up to bed—heaven knows how many of them to a room, covered with heaven knows what a horror of a carpet.
Now, that domestic scene contrasts rather shabbily, I admit, with Mrs. Gerould's picture of a really nice woman meditating a fracture of the seventh commandment in a spacious sunflooded chamber with a Chinese rug. Morals change with modes. As Mrs. Gerould has taught us, "civilization means accepting nicer and nicer things and rejecting nasty ones." And so I shall probably continue to read Mrs. Gerould's stories and to neglect Miss Alcott's, and yet to feel, after all, that though the later writer is undeniably more chic, the earlier one may have had a finer organ for detecting those "majestical traits," those flashes of the grand style in common men and women everywhere, which Emerson truly says are the charm and wonder of time.