8
THE COURIER
Belt to the stranger after a few weeks of residence. It is that the
Americans respect marriage more than wo do. It is that the cus
toms being more simple and more pure, the heart of tho young man
is repugnant to what adultery represents of bitter emotions and ul
cerated feelings even in happiness? Does time fail for the seduc
tions which much be deeply planned and slowly? Is it the disgust
of tho lie, that feature so remarkable in the soul of the Anglo
Saxon? It is certain, however, that in society you will never hear
allusion made to one of those liaisons such as exist and abound in
Paris, and even in London that line of demarcation between co
quetry and intimacy, between the surroundings of the fault and the
fault itself. American conversation always avoids it.
"Such things do not exist in the United States . . .'
This is the phrase which I havn heard several of my friends here
express, and when I objected to one of them, the attitudo of such
and such women with such and such men, which seemed to me to
bear indisputable evidence. "These women think it necessary to
have a history," one of them replied, "because they have them in
Europe. . . . Only instead of hiding them, they pub
lish them as much as possible, precisely because there is nothing
serious in them'
The stranger can but reply by the great word of doubt of the most
skeptical of people, and tho least American "Sara." Reasons of
a very different kind explain a priori, if one can say so, that the
married woman should be more protected here than in the Old
World.
The first, that we must not exaggerate, is the background of Puri
itanism which has lessened from year to year for the past fifty years
almost from month to month. But it has not yet disappeared alto
gether. One of the most eloquent of the magistrates of Massachus
sett. Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., has said in one of those
short speeches so full of soul in which he excels: "Even if our mode
of expressing our wonder, our awful fear, our abiding trust in face
of life and death and of the unfathomable world has changed, yet
at this day. even now, we New Englanders are still leavened with
the Puritan ferment." This is true of New England, which contin
ues to be tho moral ferment of America. And it must be remem
bered that it is now but two hundred years since the Mosaic law,
which punished adultery with death, was Written in the code books
of that New England.
The softening brought to bear upou that rigor was to mark only
by the letter "A," branded with a rod-hot iron, persons convicted of
the crime. Such ferocities of legislation may well nigh be forgot
ten; they leave behind theai in public opinion traces which are not
to be effaced so quickly. The campaign of Dr. Parkhuret of last
winter against the degraded women of New York and the raids ex
ecuted under his direction on one of the most icy nights of Decem
ber, on these inhabitants of the "Tenderlion" district as this gay
corner of Broadway is styled-gives evidence that the antique se
verances of reform is not extinct It b enough to make us under
stand the light Parisian fashion of accepting in joking at it,that the
menage a trois is not yet that of the United States.
The second reason is less historic and less ideal. It comes from
the extraordinary facility of divorce, at which the severe moralists
shudder. If they are right, from the point of tho greater good, they
are assuredly wrong from the point of view of tho lesser evil. Here
again the American have obeyed their instin-ts of seeing things as
they are, and of allowing themselves to be led by facts, accepting
them without discussing. They started from that very simple idea,
but which our Latin minds have not yet been able to admit, that
divorce is never a danger to the good households, and that there is a
great public and private interest that the bad ones should be broken
up as quickly and easily as possible. There has been a concurrence
of State laws to facilitate divorce. The joko has often been made
that the porters of the trains ware wont to cry out:
"Chicago, twenty minutes! Ample time for divorce !"
If the American marriage is above all things an association, it
Beems that the American family is above all a companionship, a sort
of social camping out, whose link, when it is strong, is so above all
by the effect of individual sympathies, such as exist between persona
who need not be of the same blood. I am sure, not from anecdotes,
but from experience, that the friendship between brother and sister
or sister and sister is here quite elective. It is the same with the
relations of the father and tho son and the same with the daughter.
One of my young compatriots, very much in love with a young
woman of New York, told me in one of those moments when the
coldness of a woman that you love exasperates you to the point of
the most cruel lucidity:
"She had so little heart that she went to the theatre five weeks
after the death of hermother, and no one was indignant about it!"
I know that the fact was true. But what does it prove? What
proves that inequality of the 6hare which tho liberty of bequeathing
introduces into the distribution of the legacies? Nothing else but
that our BeliBitiveness is not the same aB that of the people of this
country. They have much more self-reliance, much more individual
reaction, and above all a stronger will. That will acts on their heart
as it acts on their brain. It appears to us less loving. But are we
good judges?
It is that constant disassociation of the family life which wo must
always remember in order to understand a little the kind of celibacy
of the soul, if one can say so, which the young woman in America
continues to keep throughout marriage. Not more in the second
period of her life than in the first does love play with her that pre
ponderating part which seems to us ineeperable from feminine
destiny. When a Parieienne of forty years glances back It is the
history of her emotions which her tnemofy tells her. For an Ameri
can women of the same' age1 it is more often the history of her
actions, of what she calis, with a word which t haVe already qtldtddi
her experiences. She has had between eighteen and twenty-five"
years a conception of her own person which was not handed oier td
her by tradition she has none nor by the counsels of her parents
they have given her none nor even by her nature, for the character
istic of those minds so easily adaptable is i .at the first instinct is
without real shape and undetermined. They are like a blankf
which the will takes npon itself to fill. What that will has traced
there it has traced in letters which shall not be blotted out. Action,
and again action, and alway's action, such is the unconscious
yet constant motto of that woman.
Be it that she is hunting for a worldly position or that she is am
bitious of an artistic culture, or that she gives herself over to
matters of 6port, or that she organizes classes, as they call them, to
read with her friends Browning, Emerson or Shakespeare, that she
travels in Europe, India or Japan, or that she remains at horns with
a young friend of hers to "pour" out cups of tea you may be sure
that she is constantly active always, indefatigably in tho direction
of her refinement and of her excitement. With what an accent
those women pronounce these two words, which we must not fear to
repeat, for in them are condensed almost all the American soul!
They occur and recur in conversation, like two formulas where is
revealed the obsession of the creature, who, born of a rough raco and
feeling herself refined, wishes to be more so and still more; who,
grown up in full democracy, wishes to be aristocratic and yet more
aristocratic; who, daughter of a world of enterprise, loves still to
exaggerate in herself that feeling of nerves too much strained. To
see thus fifteen, twenty, thirty, fifty of them, tho character jf eccen
tricity is abolished which you had found in them at first in compari
son with Europeans.
Awarded Highest Honors World's Fair.
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-i'
A
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