Worldly Ways and Byways

E >> Eliot Gregory >> Worldly Ways and Byways

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During my visit I amused myself by observing the inmates and trying
to discover why they had come there. So far as I could find out,
the greater part of them belonged to our well-to-do class, and when
at home doubtless lived in luxurious houses and were waited on by
trained servants. In the small summer hotel where I met them, they
were living in dreary little ten by twelve foot rooms, containing
only the absolute necessities of existence, a wash-stand, a bureau,
two chairs and a bed. And such a bed! One mattress about four
inches thick over squeaking slats, cotton sheets, so nicely
calculated to the size of the bed that the slightest move on the
part of the sleeper would detach them from their moorings and undo
the housemaid's work; two limp, discouraged pillows that had
evidently been "banting," and a few towels a foot long with a
surface like sand-paper, completed the fittings of the room. Baths
were unknown, and hot water was a luxury distributed sparingly by a
capricious handmaiden. It is only fair to add that everything in
the room was perfectly clean, as was the coarse table linen in the
dining room.

The meals were in harmony with the rooms and furniture, consisting
only of the strict necessities, cooked with a Spartan disregard for
such sybarite foibles as seasoning or dressing. I believe there
was a substantial meal somewhere in the early morning hours, but I
never succeeded in getting down in time to inspect it. By
successful bribery, I induced one of the village belles, who served
at table, to bring a cup of coffee to my room. The first morning
it appeared already poured out in the cup, with sugar and cold milk
added at her discretion. At one o'clock a dinner was served,
consisting of soup (occasionally), one meat dish and attendant
vegetables, a meagre dessert, and nothing else. At half-past six
there was an equally rudimentary meal, called "tea," after which no
further food was distributed to the inmates, who all, however,
seemed perfectly contented with this arrangement. In fact they
apparently looked on the act of eating as a disagreeable task, to
be hurried through as soon as possible that they might return to
their aimless rocking and chattering.

Instead of dinner hour being the feature of the day, uniting people
around an attractive table, and attended by conversation, and the
meal lasting long enough for one's food to be properly eaten, it
was rushed through as though we were all trying to catch a train.
Then, when the meal was over, the boarders relapsed into apathy
again.

No one ever called this hospitable home a boarding-house, for the
proprietor was furious if it was given that name. He also scorned
the idea of keeping a hotel. So that I never quite understood in
what relation he stood toward us. He certainly considered himself
our host, and ignored the financial side of the question severely.
In order not to hurt his feelings by speaking to him of money, we
were obliged to get our bills by strategy from a male subordinate.
Mine host and his family were apparently unaware that there were
people under their roof who paid them for board and lodging. We
were all looked upon as guests and "entertained," and our rights
impartially ignored.

Nothing, I find, is so distinctive of New England as this graceful
veiling of the practical side of life. The landlady always
reminded me, by her manner, of Barrie's description of the bill-
sticker's wife who "cut" her husband when she chanced to meet him
"professionally" engaged. As a result of this extreme detachment
from things material, the house ran itself, or was run by
incompetent Irish and negro "help." There were no bells in the
rooms, which simplified the service, and nothing could be ordered
out of meal hours.

The material defects in board and lodging sink, however, into
insignificance before the moral and social unpleasantness of an
establishment such as this. All ages, all conditions, and all
creeds are promiscuously huddled together. It is impossible to
choose whom one shall know or whom avoid. A horrible burlesque of
family life is enabled, with all its inconveniences and none of its
sanctity. People from different cities, with different interests
and standards, are expected to "chum" together in an intimacy that
begins with the eight o'clock breakfast and ends only when all
retire for the night. No privacy, no isolation is allowed. If you
take a book and begin to read in a remote corner of a parlor or
piazza, some idle matron or idiotic girl will tranquilly invade
your poor little bit of privacy and gabble of her affairs and the
day's gossip. There is no escape unless you mount to your ten-by-
twelve cell and sit (like the Premiers of England when they visit
Balmoral) on the bed, to do your writing, for want of any other
conveniences. Even such retirement is resented by the boarders.
You are thought to be haughty and to give yourself airs if you do
not sit for twelve consecutive hours each day in unending
conversation with them.

When one reflects that thousands of our countrymen pass at least
one-half of their lives in these asylums, and that thousands more
in America know no other homes, but move from one hotel to another,
while the same outlay would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings,
it does seem as if these modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-
ouins," were gradually returning to prehistoric habits and would
end by eating roots promiscuously in caves.

The contradiction appears more marked the longer one reflects on
the love of independence and impatience of all restraint that
characterize our race. If such an institution had been conceived
by people of the Old World, accustomed to moral slavery and to a
thousand petty tyrannies, it would not be so remarkable, but that
we, of all the races of the earth, should have created a form of
torture unknown to Louis XI. or to the Spanish Inquisitors, is
indeed inexplicable! Outside of this happy land the institution is
unknown. The PENSION when it exists abroad, is only an exotic
growth for an American market. Among European nations it is
undreamed of; the poorest when they travel take furnished rooms,
where they are served in private, or go to restaurants or TABLE
D'HOTES for their meals. In a strictly continental hotel the
public parlor does not exist. People do not travel to make
acquaintances, but for health or recreation, or to improve their
minds. The enforced intimacy of our American family house, with
its attendant quarrelling and back-biting, is an infliction of
which Europeans are in happy ignorance.

One explanation, only, occurs to me, which is that among New
England people, largely descended from Puritan stock, there still
lingers some blind impulse at self-mortification, an hereditary
inclination to make this life as disagreeable as possible by self-
immolation. Their ancestors, we are told by Macaulay, suppressed
bull baiting, not because it hurt the bull, but because it gave
pleasure to the people. Here in New England they refused the Roman
dogma of Purgatory and then with complete inconsistency, invented
the boarding-house, in order, doubtless, to take as much of the joy
as possible out of this life, as a preparation for endless bliss in
the next.

CHAPTER 15 - A False Start

HAVING had, during a wandering existence, many opportunities of
observing my compatriots away from home and familiar surroundings
in various circles of cosmopolitan society, at foreign courts, in
diplomatic life, or unofficial capacities, I am forced to
acknowledge that whereas my countrywoman invariably assumed her new
position with grace and dignity, my countryman, in the majority of
cases, appeared at a disadvantage.

I take particular pleasure in making this tribute to my "sisters"
tact and wit, as I have been accused of being "hard" on American
women, and some half-humorous criticisms have been taken seriously
by over-susceptible women - doubtless troubled with guilty
consciences for nothing is more exact than the old French proverb,
"It is only the truth that wounds."

The fact remains clear, however, that American men, as regards
polish, facility in expressing themselves in foreign languages, the
arts of pleasing and entertaining, in short, the thousand and one
nothings composing that agreeable whole, a cultivated member of
society, are inferior to their womankind. I feel sure that all
Americans who have travelled and have seen their compatriot in his
social relations with foreigners, will agree with this, reluctant
as I am to acknowledge it.

That a sister and brother brought up together, under the same
influences, should later differ to this extent seems incredible.
It is just this that convinces me we have made a false start as
regards the education and ambitions of our young men.

To find the reasons one has only to glance back at our past. After
the struggle that insured our existence as a united nation, came a
period of great prosperity. When both seemed secure, we did not
pause and take breath, as it were, before entering a new epoch of
development, but dashed ahead on the old lines. It is here that we
got on the wrong road. Naturally enough too, for our peculiar
position on this continent, far away from the centres of
cultivation and art, surrounded only by less successful states with
which to compare ourselves, has led us into forming erroneous ideas
as to the proportions of things, causing us to exaggerate the value
of material prosperity and undervalue matters of infinitely greater
importance, which have been neglected in consequence.

A man who, after fighting through our late war, had succeeded in
amassing a fortune, naturally wished his son to follow him on the
only road in which it had ever occurred to him that success was of
any importance. So beyond giving the boy a college education,
which he had not enjoyed, his ambition rarely went; his idea being
to make a practical business man of him, or a lawyer, that he could
keep the estate together more intelligently. In thousands of
cases, of course, individual taste and bent over-ruled this
influence, and a career of science or art was chosen; but in the
mass of the American people, it was firmly implanted that the
pursuit of wealth was the only occupation to which a reasonable
human being could devote himself. A young man who was not in some
way engaged in increasing his income was looked upon as a very
undesirable member of society, and sure, sooner or later, to come
to harm.

Millionaires declined to send their sons to college, saying they
would get ideas there that would unfit them for business, to
Paterfamilias the one object of life. Under such fostering
influences, the ambitions in our country have gradually given way
to money standards and the false start has been made! Leaving
aside at once the question of money in its relation to our politics
(although it would be a fruitful subject for moralizing), and
confining ourselves strictly to the social side of life, we soon
see the results of this mammon worship.

In England (although Englishmen have been contemptuously called the
shop-keepers of the world) the extension and maintenance of their
vast empire is the mainspring which keeps the great machine in
movement. And one sees tens of thousands of well-born and
delicately-bred men cheerfully entering the many branches of public
service where the hope of wealth can never come, and retiring on
pensions or half-pay in the strength of their middle age,
apparently without a regret or a thought beyond their country's
well-being.

In France, where the passionate love of their own land has made
colonial extension impossible, the modern Frenchman of education is
more interested in the yearly exhibition at the SALON or in a
successful play at the FRANCAIS, than in the stock markets of the
world.

Would that our young men had either of these bents! They have
copied from England a certain love of sport, without the English
climate or the calm of country and garrison life, to make these
sports logical and necessary. As the young American millionaire
thinks he must go on increasing his fortune, we see the anomaly of
a man working through a summer's day in Wall Street, then dashing
in a train to some suburban club, and appearing a half-hour later
on the polo field. Next to wealth, sport has become the ambition
of the wealthy classes, and has grown so into our college life that
the number of students in the freshman class of our great
universities is seriously influenced by that institution's losses
or gains at football.

What is the result of all this? A young man starts in life with
the firm intention of making a great deal of money. If he has any
time left from that occupation he will devote it to sport. Later
in life, when he has leisure and travels, or is otherwise thrown
with cultivated strangers, he must naturally be at a disadvantage.
"Shop," he cannot talk; he knows that is vulgar. Music, art, the
drama, and literature are closed books to him, in spite of the fact
that he may have a box on the grand tier at the opera and a couple
of dozen high-priced "masterpieces" hanging around his drawing-
rooms. If he is of a finer clay than the general run of his class,
he will realize dimly that somehow the goal has been missed in his
life race. His chase after the material has left him so little
time to cultivate the ideal, that he has prepared himself a sad and
aimless old age; unless he can find pleasure in doing as did a man
I have been told about, who, receiving half a dozen millions from
his father's estate, conceived the noble idea of increasing them so
that he might leave to each of his four children as much as he had
himself received. With the strictest economy, and by suppressing
out of his life and that of his children all amusements and
superfluous outlay, he has succeeded now for many years in living
on the income of his income. Time will never hang heavy on this
Harpagon's hands. He is a perfectly happy individual, but his
conversation is hardly of a kind to attract, and it may be doubted
if the rest of the family are as much to be envied.

An artist who had lived many years of his life in Paris and London
was speaking the other day of a curious phase he had remarked in
our American life. He had been accustomed over there to have his
studio the meeting-place of friends, who would drop in to smoke and
lounge away an hour, chatting as he worked. To his astonishment,
he tells me that since he has been in New York not one of the many
men he knows has ever passed an hour in his rooms. Is not that a
significant fact? Another remark which points its own moral was
repeated to me recently. A foreigner visiting here, to whom
American friends were showing the sights of our city, exclaimed at
last: "You have not pointed out to me any celebrities except
millionaires. 'Do you see that man? he is worth ten millions.
Look at that house! it cost one million dollars, and there are
pictures in it worth over three million dollars. That trotter cost
one hundred thousand dollars,' etc." Was he not right? And does
it not give my reader a shudder to see in black and white the
phrases that are, nevertheless, so often on our lips?

This levelling of everything to its cash value is so ingrained in
us that we are unconscious of it, as we are of using slang or local
expressions until our attention is called to them. I was present
once at a farce played in a London theatre, where the audience went
into roars of laughter every time the stage American said, "Why,
certainly." I was indignant, and began explaining to my English
friend that we never used such an absurd phrase. "Are you sure?"
he asked. "Why, certainly," I said, and stopped, catching the
twinkle in his eye.

It is very much the same thing with money. We do not notice how
often it slips into the conversation. "Out of the fullness of the
heart the mouth speaketh." Talk to an American of a painter and
the charm of his work. He will be sure to ask, "Do his pictures
sell well?" and will lose all interest if you say he can't sell
them at all. As if that had anything to do with it!

Remembering the well-known anecdote of Schopenhauer and the gold
piece which he used to put beside his plate at the TABLE D'HOTE,
where he ate, surrounded by the young officers of the German army,
and which was to be given to the poor the first time he heard any
conversation that was not about promotion or women, I have been
tempted to try the experiment in our clubs, changing the subjects
to stocks and sport, and feel confident that my contributions to
charity would not ruin me.

All this has had the result of making our men dull companions;
after dinner, or at a country house, if the subject they love is
tabooed, they talk of nothing! It is sad for a rich man (unless
his mind has remained entirely between the leaves of his ledger) to
realize that money really buys very little, and above a certain
amount can give no satisfaction in proportion to its bulk, beyond
that delight which comes from a sense of possession. Croesus often
discovers as he grows old that he has neglected to provide himself
with the only thing that "is a joy for ever" - a cultivated
intellect - in order to amass a fortune that turns to ashes, when
he has time to ask of it any of the pleasures and resources he
fondly imagined it would afford him. Like Talleyrand's young man
who would not learn whist, he finds that he has prepared for
himself a dreadful old age!

CHAPTER 16 - A Holy Land

NOT long ago an article came under my notice descriptive of the
neighborhood around Grant's tomb and the calm that midsummer brings
to that vicinity, laughingly referred to as the "Holy Land."

As careless fingers wandering over the strings of a violin may
unintentionally strike a chord, so the writer of those lines, all
unconsciously, with a jest, set vibrating a world of tender
memories and associations; for the region spoken of is truly a holy
land to me, the playground of my youth, and connected with the
sweetest ties that can bind one's thoughts to the past.

Ernest Renan in his SOUVENIRS D'ENFANCE, tells of a Brittany
legend, firmly believed in that wild land, of the vanished city of
"Is," which ages ago disappeared beneath the waves. The peasants
still point out at a certain place on the coast the site of the
fabled city, and the fishermen tell how during great storms they
have caught glimpses of its belfries and ramparts far down between
the waves; and assert that on calm summer nights they can hear the
bells chiming up from those depths. I also have a vanished "Is" in
my heart, and as I grow older, I love to listen to the murmurs that
float up from the past. They seem to come from an infinite
distance, almost like echoes from another life.

At that enchanted time we lived during the summers in an old wooden
house my father had re-arranged into a fairly comfortable dwelling.
A tradition, which no one had ever taken the trouble to verify,
averred that Washington had once lived there, which made that hero
very real to us. The picturesque old house stood high on a slope
where the land rises boldly; with an admirable view of distant
mountain, river and opposing Palisades.

The new Riverside drive (which, by the bye, should make us very
lenient toward the men who robbed our city a score of years ago,
for they left us that vast work in atonement), has so changed the
neighborhood it is impossible now for pious feet to make a
pilgrimage to those childish shrines. One house, however, still
stands as when it was our nearest neighbor. It had sheltered
General Gage, land for many acres around had belonged to him. He
was an enthusiastic gardener, and imported, among a hundred other
fruits and plants, the "Queen Claude" plum from France, which was
successfully acclimated on his farm. In New York a plum of that
kind is still called a "green gage." The house has changed hands
many times since we used to play around the Grecian pillars of its
portico. A recent owner, dissatisfied doubtless with its classic
simplicity, has painted it a cheerful mustard color and crowned it
with a fine new MANSARD roof. Thus disfigured, and shorn of its
surrounding trees, the poor old house stands blankly by the
roadside, reminding one of the Greek statue in Anstey's "Painted
Venus" after the London barber had decorated her to his taste.
When driving by there now, I close my eyes.

Another house, where we used to be taken to play, was that of
Audubon, in the park of that name. Many a rainy afternoon I have
passed with his children choosing our favorite birds in the glass
cases that filled every nook and corner of the tumble-down old
place, or turning over the leaves of the enormous volumes he would
so graciously take down from their places for our amusement. I
often wonder what has become of those vast IN-FOLIOS, and if any
one ever opens them now and admires as we did the glowing colored
plates in which the old ornithologist took such pride. There is
something infinitely sad in the idea of a collection of books
slowly gathered together at the price of privations and sacrifices,
cherished, fondled, lovingly read, and then at the owner's death,
coldly sent away to stand for ever unopened on the shelves of some
public library. It is like neglecting poor dumb children!

An event that made a profound impression on my childish imagination
occurred while my father, who was never tired of improving our
little domain, was cutting a pathway down the steep side of the
slope to the river. A great slab, dislodged by a workman's pick,
fell disclosing the grave of an Indian chief. In a low archway or
shallow cave sat the skeleton of the chieftain, his bows and arrows
arranged around him on the ground, mingled with fragments of an
elaborate costume, of which little remained but the bead-work.
That it was the tomb of a man great among his people was evident
from the care with which the grave had been prepared and then
hidden, proving how, hundreds of years before our civilization,
another race had chosen this noble cliff and stately river
landscape as the fitting framework for a great warrior's tomb.

This discovery made no little stir in the scientific world of that
day. Hundreds came to see it, and as photography had not then come
into the world, many drawings were made and casts taken, and
finally the whole thing was removed to the rooms of the Historical
Society. From that day the lonely little path held an awful charm
for us. Our childish readings of Cooper had developed in us that
love of the Indian and his wild life, so characteristic of boyhood
thirty years ago. On still summer afternoons, the place had a
primeval calm that froze the young blood in our veins. Although we
prided ourselves on our quality as "braves," and secretly pined to
be led on the war-path, we were shy of walking in that vicinity in
daylight, and no power on earth, not even the offer of the tomahawk
or snow-shoes for which our souls longed, would have taken us there
at night.

A place connected in my memory with a tragic association was across
the river on the last southern slope of the Palisades. Here we
stood breathless while my father told the brief story of the duel
between Burr and Hamilton, and showed us the rock stained by the
younger man's life-blood. In those days there was a simple iron
railing around the spot where Hamilton had expired, but of later
years I have been unable to find any trace of the place. The tide
of immigration has brought so deep a deposit of "saloons" and
suburban "balls" that the very face of the land is changed, old
lovers of that shore know it no more. Never were the environs of a
city so wantonly and recklessly degraded. Municipalities have vied
with millionaires in soiling and debasing the exquisite shores of
our river, that, thirty years ago, were unrivalled the world over.

The glamour of the past still lies for me upon this landscape in
spite of its many defacements. The river whispers of boyish
boating parties, and the woods recall a thousand childish hopes and
fears, resolute departures to join the pirates, or the red men in
their strongholds - journeys boldly carried out until twilight
cooled our courage and the supper-hour proved a stronger temptation
than war and carnage.

When I sat down this summer evening to write a few lines about
happy days on the banks of the Hudson, I hardly realized how sweet
those memories were to me. The rewriting of the old names has
evoked from their long sleep so many loved faces. Arms seem
reaching out to me from the past. The house is very still tonight.
I seem to be nearer my loved dead than to the living. The bells of
my lost "Is" are ringing clear in the silence.

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