Worldly Ways and Byways
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Eliot Gregory >> Worldly Ways and Byways
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I have in my mind a little settlement of this kind at Versailles,
which was a type. The formal old city, fallen from its grandeur,
was a singularly appropriate setting to the little comedy. There
the modest purses of the exiles found rents within their reach, the
quarters vast and airy. The galleries and the park afforded a
diversion, and then Paris, dear Paris, the American Mecca, was
within reach. At the time I knew it, the colony was fairly
prosperous, many of its members living in the two or three
principal PENSIONS, the others in apartments of their own. They
gave feeble little entertainments among themselves, card-parties
and teas, and dined about with each other at their respective
TABLES D'HOTE, even knowing a stray Frenchman or two, whom the
quest of a meal had tempted out of their native fastnesses as it
does the wolves in a hard winter. Writing and receiving letters
from America was one of the principal occupations, and an epistle
descriptive of a particular event at home went the rounds, and was
eagerly read and discussed.
The merits of the different PENSIONS also formed a subject of vital
interest. The advantages and disadvantages of these rival
establishments were, as a topic, never exhausted. MADAME UNE TELLE
gave five o'clock tea, included in the seven francs a day, but her
rival gave one more meat course at dinner and her coffee was
certainly better, while a third undoubtedly had a nicer set of
people. No one here at home can realize the importance these
matters gradually assume in the eyes of the exiles. Their slender
incomes have to be so carefully handled to meet the strain of even
this simple way of living, if they are to show a surplus for a
little trip to the seashore in the summer months, that an extra
franc a day becomes a serious consideration.
Every now and then a family stronger-minded than the others, or
with serious reasons for returning home (a daughter to bring out or
a son to put into business), would break away from its somnolent
surroundings and re-cross the Atlantic, alternating between hope
and fear. It is here that a sad fate awaits these modern Rip Van
Winkles. They find their native cities changed beyond recognition.
(For we move fast in these days.) The mother gets out her visiting
list of ten years before and is thunderstruck to find that it
contains chiefly names of the "dead, the divorced, and defaulted."
The waves of a decade have washed over her place and the world she
once belonged to knows her no more. The leaders of her day on
whose aid she counted have retired from the fray. Younger, and
alas! unknown faces sit in the opera boxes and around the dinner
tables where before she had found only friends. After a feeble
little struggle to get again into the "swim," the family drifts
back across the ocean into the quiet back water of a continental
town, and goes circling around with the other twigs and dry leaves,
moral flotsam and jetsam, thrown aside by the great rush of the
outside world.
For the parents the life is not too sad. They have had their day,
and are, perhaps, a little glad in their hearts of a quiet old age,
away from the heat and sweat of the battle; but for the younger
generation it is annihilation. Each year their circle grows
smaller. Death takes away one member after another of the family,
until one is left alone in a foreign land with no ties around her,
or with her far-away "home," the latter more a name now than a
reality.
A year or two ago I was taking luncheon with our consul at his
primitive villa, an hour's ride from the city of Tangier, a ride
made on donkey-back, as no roads exist in that sunny land. After
our coffee and cigars, he took me a half-hour's walk into the
wilderness around him to call on his nearest neighbors, whose mode
of existence seemed a source of anxiety to him. I found myself in
the presence of two American ladies, the younger being certainly
not less than seventy-five. To my astonishment I found they had
been living there some thirty years, since the death of their
parents, in an isolation and remoteness impossible to describe, in
an Arab house, with native servants, "the world forgetting, by the
world forgot." Yet these ladies had names well known in New York
fifty years ago.
The glimpse I had of their existence made me thoughtful as I rode
home in the twilight, across a suburb none too safe for strangers.
What had the future in store for those two? Or, worse still, for
the survivor of those two? In contrast, I saw a certain humble
"home" far away in America, where two old ladies were ending their
lives surrounded by loving friends and relations, honored and
cherished and guarded tenderly from the rude world.
In big cities like Paris and Rome there is another class of the
expatriated, the wealthy who have left their homes in a moment of
pique after the failure of some social or political ambition; and
who find in these centres the recognition refused them at home and
for which their souls thirsted.
It is not to these I refer, although it is curious to see a group
of people living for years in a country of which they, half the
time, do not speak the language (beyond the necessities of house-
keeping and shopping), knowing but few of its inhabitants, and
seeing none of the society of the place, their acquaintance rarely
going beyond that equivocal, hybrid class that surrounds rich
"strangers" and hangs on to the outer edge of the GRAND MONDE. One
feels for this latter class merely contempt, but one's pity is
reserved for the former. What object lessons some lives on the
Continent would be to impatient souls at home, who feel
discontented with their surroundings, and anxious to break away and
wander abroad! Let them think twice before they cut the thousand
ties it has taken a lifetime to form. Better monotony at your own
fireside, my friends, where at the worst, you are known and have
your place, no matter how small, than an old age among strangers.
CHAPTER 12 - "Seven Ages" of Furniture
THE progress through life of active-minded Americans is apt to be a
series of transformations. At each succeeding phase of mental
development, an old skin drops from their growing intelligence, and
they assimilate the ideas and tastes of their new condition, with a
facility and completeness unknown to other nations.
One series of metamorphoses particularly amusing to watch is, that
of an observant, receptive daughter of Uncle Sam who, aided and
followed (at a distance) by an adoring husband, gradually develops
her excellent brain, and rises through fathoms of self-culture and
purblind experiment, to the surface of dilettantism and
connoisseurship. One can generally detect the exact stage of
evolution such a lady has reached by the bent of her conversation,
the books she is reading, and, last but not least, by her material
surroundings; no outward and visible signs reflecting inward and
spiritual grace so clearly as the objects people collect around
them for the adornment of their rooms, or the way in which those
rooms are decorated.
A few years ago, when a young man and his bride set up housekeeping
on their own account, the "old people" of both families seized the
opportunity to unload on the beginners (under the pretence of
helping them along) a quantity of furniture and belongings that had
(as the shopkeepers say) "ceased to please" their original owners.
The narrow quarters of the tyros are encumbered by ungainly sofas
and arm-chairs, most probably of carved rosewood. ETAGERES OF the
same lugubrious material grace the corners of their tiny drawing-
room, the bits of mirror inserted between the shelves distorting
the image of the owners into headless or limbless phantoms. Half
of their little dining-room is filled with a black-walnut
sideboard, ingeniously contrived to take up as much space as
possible and hold nothing, its graceless top adorned with a stag's
head carved in wood and imitation antlers.
The novices in their innocence live contented amid their hideous
surroundings for a year or two, when the wife enters her second
epoch, which, for want of a better word, we will call the Japanese
period. The grim furniture gradually disappears under a layer of
silk and gauze draperies, the bare walls blossom with paper
umbrellas, fans are nailed in groups promiscuously, wherever an
empty space offends her eye. Bows of ribbon are attached to every
possible protuberance of the furniture. Even the table service is
not spared. I remember dining at a house in this stage of its
artistic development, where the marrow bones that formed one course
of the dinner appeared each with a coquettish little bow-knot of
pink ribbon around its neck.
Once launched on this sea of adornment, the housewife soon loses
her bearings and decorates indiscriminately. Her old evening
dresses serve to drape the mantelpieces, and she passes every spare
hour embroidering, braiding, or fringing some material to adorn her
rooms. At Christmas her friends contribute specimens of their
handiwork to the collection.
The view of other houses and other decorations before long
introduces the worm of discontent into the blossom of our friend's
contentment. The fruit of her labors becomes tasteless on her
lips. As the finances of the family are satisfactory, the re-
arrangement of the parlor floor is (at her suggestion) confided to
a firm of upholsterers, who make a clean sweep of the rosewood and
the bow-knots, and retire, after some months of labor, leaving the
delighted wife in possession of a suite of rooms glittering with
every monstrosity that an imaginative tradesman, spurred on by
unlimited credit, could devise.
The wood work of the doors and mantels is an intricate puzzle of
inlaid woods, the ceilings are panelled and painted in complicated
designs. The "parlor" is provided with a complete set of neat,
old-gold satin furniture, puffed at its angles with peacock-colored
plush.
The monumental folding doors between the long, narrow rooms are
draped with the same chaste combination of stuffs.
The dining-room blazes with a gold and purple wall paper, set off
by ebonized wood work and furniture. The conscientious contractor
has neglected no corner. Every square inch of the ceilings, walls,
and floors has been carved, embossed, stencilled, or gilded into a
bewildering monotony.
The husband, whose affairs are rapidly increasing on his hands, has
no time to attend to such insignificant details as house
decoration, the wife has perfect confidence in the taste of the
firm employed. So at the suggestion of the latter, and in order to
complete the beauty of the rooms, a Bouguereau, a Toulmouche and a
couple of Schreyers are bought, and a number of modern French
bronzes scattered about on the multicolored cabinets. Then, at
last, the happy owners of all this splendor open their doors to the
admiration of their friends.
About the time the peacock plush and the gilding begin to show
signs of wear and tear, rumors of a fresh fashion in decoration
float across from England, and the new gospel of the beautiful
according to Clarence Cook is first preached to an astonished
nation.
The fortune of our couple continuing to develop with pleasing
rapidity, the building of a country house is next decided upon. A
friend of the husband, who has recently started out as an
architect, designs them a picturesque residence without a straight
line on its exterior or a square room inside. This house is done
up in strict obedience to the teachings of the new sect. The
dining-room is made about as cheerful as the entrance to a family
vault. The rest of the house bears a close resemblance to an
ecclesiastical junk shop. The entrance hall is filled with what
appears to be a communion table in solid oak, and the massive
chairs and settees of the parlor suggest the withdrawing room of
Rowena, aesthetic shades of momie-cloth drape deep-set windows,
where anaemic and disjointed females in stained glass pluck
conventional roses.
To each of these successive transitions the husband has remained
obediently and tranquilly indifferent. He has in his heart
considered them all equally unfitting and uncomfortable and sighed
in regretful memory of a deep, old-fashioned arm-chair that
sheltered his after-dinner naps in the early rosewood period. So
far he has been as clay in the hands of his beloved wife, but the
anaemic ladies and the communion table are the last drop that
causes his cup to overflow. He revolts and begins to take matters
into his own hands with the result that the household enters its
fifth incarnation under his guidance, during which everything is
painted white and all the wall-papers are a vivid scarlet. The
family sit on bogus Chippendale and eat off blue and white china.
With the building of their grand new house near the park the couple
rise together into the sixth cycle of their development. Having
travelled and studied the epochs by this time, they can tell a
Louis XIV. from a Louis XV. room, and recognize that mahogany and
brass sphinxes denote furniture of the Empire. This newly acquired
knowledge is, however, vague and hazy. They have no confidence in
themselves, so give over the fitting of their principal floors to
the New York branch of a great French house. Little is talked of
now but periods, plans, and elevations. Under the guidance of the
French firm, they acquire at vast expense, faked reproductions as
historic furniture.
The spacious rooms are sticky with new gilding, and the flowered
brocades of the hangings and furniture crackle to the touch. The
rooms were not designed by the architect to receive any special
kind of "treatment." Immense folding-doors unite the salons, and
windows open anywhere. The decorations of the walls have been
applied like a poultice, regardless of the proportions of the rooms
and the distribution of the spaces.
Building and decorating are, however, the best of educations. The
husband, freed at last from his business occupations, finds in this
new study an interest and a charm unknown to him before. He and
his wife are both vaguely disappointed when their resplendent
mansion is finished, having already outgrown it, and recognize that
in spite of correct detail, their costly apartments no more
resemble the stately and simple salons seen abroad than the cabin
of a Fall River boat resembles the GALERIE DES GLACES at
Versailles. The humiliating knowledge that they are all wrong
breaks upon them, as it is doing on hundreds of others, at the same
time as the desire to know more and appreciate better the perfect
productions of this art.
A seventh and last step is before them but they know not how to
make it. A surer guide than the upholsterer is, they know,
essential, but their library contains nothing to help them. Others
possess the information they need, yet they are ignorant where to
turn for what they require.
With singular appropriateness a volume treating of this delightful
"art" has this season appeared at Scribner's. "The Decoration of
Houses" is the result of a woman's faultless taste collaborating
with a man's technical knowledge. Its mission is to reveal to the
hundreds who have advanced just far enough to find that they can go
no farther alone, truths lying concealed beneath the surface. It
teaches that consummate taste is satisfied only with a perfected
simplicity; that the facades of a house must be the envelope of the
rooms within and adapted to them, as the rooms are to the habits
and requirements of them "that dwell therein;" that proportion is
the backbone of the decorator's art and that supreme elegance is
fitness and moderation; and, above all, that an attention to
architectural principles can alone lead decoration to a perfect
development.
CHAPTER 13 - Our Elite and Public Life
THE complaint is so often heard, and seems so well founded, that
there is a growing inclination, not only among men of social
position, but also among our best and cleverest citizens, to stand
aloof from public life, and this reluctance on their part is so
unfortunate, that one feels impelled to seek out the causes where
they must lie, beneath the surface. At a first glance they are not
apparent. Why should not the honor of representing one's town or
locality be as eagerly sought after with us as it is by English or
French men of position? That such is not the case, however, is
evident.
Speaking of this the other evening, over my after-dinner coffee,
with a high-minded and public-spirited gentleman, who not long ago
represented our country at a European court, he advanced two
theories which struck me as being well worth repeating, and which
seemed to account to a certain extent for this curious abstinence.
As a first and most important cause, he placed the fact that
neither our national nor (here in New York) our state capital
coincides with our metropolis. In this we differ from England and
all the continental countries. The result is not difficult to
perceive. In London, a man of the world, a business man, or a
great lawyer, who represents a locality in Parliament, can fulfil
his mandate and at the same time lead his usual life among his own
set. The lawyer or the business man can follow during the day his
profession, or those affairs on which he depends to support his
family and his position in the world. Then, after dinner (owing to
the peculiar hours adopted for the sittings of Parliament), he can
take his place as a law-maker. If he be a London-born man, he in
no way changes his way of life or that of his family. If, on the
contrary, he be a county magnate, the change he makes is all for
the better, as it takes him and his wife and daughters up to
London, the haven of their longings, and the centre of all sorts of
social dissipations and advancement.
With us, it is exactly the contrary. As the District of Columbia
elects no one, everybody living in Washington officially is more or
less expatriated, and the social life it offers is a poor
substitute for the circle which most families leave to go there.
That, however, is not the most important side of the question. Go
to any great lawyer of either New York or Chicago, and propose
sending him to Congress or the Senate. His answer is sure to be,
"I cannot afford it. I know it is an honor, but what is to replace
the hundred thousand dollars a year which my profession brings me
in, not to mention that all my practice would go to pieces during
my absence?" Or again, "How should I dare to propose to my family
to leave one of the great centres of the country to go and vegetate
in a little provincial city like Washington? No, indeed! Public
life is out of the question for me!"
Does any one suppose England would have the class of men she gets
in Parliament, if that body sat at Bristol?
Until recently the man who occupied the position of Lord Chancellor
made thirty thousand pounds a year by his profession without
interfering in any way with his public duties, and at the present
moment a recordership in London in no wise prevents private
practice. Were these gentlemen Americans, they would be obliged to
renounce all hope of professional income in order to serve their
country at its Capital.
Let us glance for a moment at the other reason. Owing to our laws
(doubtless perfectly reasonable, and which it is not my intention
to criticise,) a man must reside in the place he represents. Here
again we differ from all other constitutional countries.
Unfortunately, our clever young men leave the small towns of their
birth and flock up to the great centres as offering wider fields
for their advancement. In consequence, the local elector finds his
choice limited to what is left - the intellectual skimmed milk, of
which the cream has been carried to New York or other big cities.
No country can exist without a metropolis, and as such a centre by
a natural law of assimilation absorbs the best brains of the
country, in other nations it has been found to the interests of all
parties to send down brilliant young men to the "provinces," to be,
in good time, returned by them to the national assemblies.
As this is not a political article the simple indication of these
two causes will suffice, without entering into the question of
their reasonableness or of their justice. The social bearing of
such a condition is here the only side of the question under
discussion; it is difficult to over-rate the influence that a man's
family exert over his decisions.
Political ambition is exceedingly rare among our women of position;
when the American husband is bitten with it, the wife submits to,
rather than abets, his inclinations. In most cases our women are
not cosmopolitan enough to enjoy being transplanted far away from
their friends and relations, even to fill positions of importance
and honor. A New York woman of great frankness and intelligence,
who found herself recently in a Western city under these
circumstances, said, in answer to a flattering remark that "the
ladies of the place expected her to become their social leader," "I
don't see anything to lead," thus very plainly expressing her
opinion of the situation. It is hardly fair to expect a woman
accustomed to the life of New York or the foreign capitals, to look
forward with enthusiasm to a term of years passed in Albany, or in
Washington.
In France very much the same state of affairs has been reached by
quite a different route. The aristocracy detest the present
government, and it is not considered "good form" by them to sit in
the Chamber of Deputies or to accept any but diplomatic positions.
They condescend to fill the latter because that entails living away
from their own country, as they feel more at ease in foreign courts
than at the Republican receptions of the Elysee.
There is a deplorable tendency among our self-styled aristocracy to
look upon their circle as a class apart. They separate themselves
more each year from the life of the country, and affect to smile at
any of their number who honestly wish to be of service to the
nation. They, like the French aristocracy, are perfectly willing,
even anxious, to fill agreeable diplomatic posts at first-class
foreign capitals, and are naively astonished when their offers of
service are not accepted with gratitude by the authorities in
Washington. But let a husband propose to his better half some
humble position in the machinery of our government, and see what
the lady's answer will be.
The opinion prevails among a large class of our wealthy and
cultivated people, that to go into public life is to descend to
duties beneath them. They judge the men who occupy such positions
with insulting severity, classing them in their minds as corrupt
and self-seeking, than which nothing can be more childish or more
imbecile. Any observer who has lived in the different grades of
society will quickly renounce the puerile idea that sporting or
intellectual pursuits are alone worthy of a gentleman's attention.
This very political life, which appears unworthy of their attention
to so many men, is, in reality, the great field where the nations
of the world fight out their differences, where the seed is sown
that will ripen later into vast crops of truth and justice. It is
(if rightly regarded and honestly followed) the battle-ground where
man's highest qualities are put to their noblest use - that of
working for the happiness of others.
CHAPTER 14 - The Small Summer Hotel
WE certainly are the most eccentric race on the surface of the
globe and ought to be a delight to the soul of an explorer, so full
is our civilization of contradictions, unexplained habits and
curious customs. It is quite unnecessary for the inquisitive
gentlemen who pass their time prying into other people's affairs
and then returning home to write books about their discoveries, to
risk their lives and digestions in long journeys into Central
Africa or to the frozen zones, while so much good material lies
ready to their hands in our own land. The habits of the "natives"
in New England alone might occupy an active mind indefinitely,
offering as interesting problems as any to be solved by penetrating
Central Asia or visiting the man-eating tribes of Australia.
Perhaps one of our scientific celebrities, before undertaking his
next long voyage, will find time to make observations at home and
collect sufficient data to answer some questions that have long
puzzled my unscientific brain. He would be doing good work. Fame
and honors await the man who can explain why, for instance, sane
Americans of the better class, with money enough to choose their
surroundings, should pass so much of their time in hotels and
boarding houses. There must be a reason for the vogue of these
retreats - every action has a cause, however remote. I shall await
with the deepest interest a paper on this subject from one of our
great explorers, untoward circumstances having some time ago forced
me to pass a few days in a popular establishment of this class.
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