Ars Recte Vivende
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George William Curtis >> Ars Recte Vivende
Behavior, however, can be imitated. Therefore, neither the fact of birth
under certain conditions, nor a certain ease and grace and charm of manner,
certify the essential character of gentleman. Lovelace had the air and
breeding of a gentleman like Don Giovanni; he was familiar with polite
society; he was refined and pleasing and fascinating in manner. Even the
severe Astarte could not call him a boor. She does not know a gentleman,
probably, more gentlemanly than Lovelace. She must, then, admit that
she can not arbitrarily deny Lovelace to be a gentleman because he is a
libertine, or because he is false, or mean, or of a coarse mind. She may,
indeed, insist that only upright and honorable men of refined mind and
manner are gentlemen, and she may also maintain that only men of truly
lofty and royal souls are princes; but there will still remain crowds of
immoral gentlemen and unworthy kings.
The persons who abused the generous courtesy of the Northern Pacific trip
were gentlemen in one sense, and not in the other. They were gentlemen so
far as they could not help themselves, but they were not gentlemen in what
depended upon their own will. According to the story, they did not even
imitate the conduct of gentlemen, and Astarte must admit that they belonged
to the large class of ungentlemanly gentlemen.
(_December_, 1883)
THEATRE MANNERS
An admirable actress said the other day that the audience in the theatre
was probably little aware how much its conduct affected the performance. A
listless, whispering, uneasy house makes a distracted and ineffective play.
To an orator, or an actor, or an artist of any kind who appeals personally
to the public, nothing is so fatal as indifference. In the original
Wallack's Theatre, many years ago, the Easy Chair was one of a party in
a stage-box during a fine performance of one of the plays in which the
acting of the manager was most effective. It was a gay party, and with the
carelessness of youth it made merry while the play went on. As the box was
directly upon the stage, the merriment was a gross discourtesy, although
unintentional, both to the actors and to the audience; and at last the old
Wallack, still gayly playing his part, moved towards the box, and without
turning his head, in a voice audible to the offenders but not to the rest
of the audience, politely reminded the thoughtless group that they were
seriously disturbing the play. There was some indignation in the box, but
the rebuke was courteous and richly deserved. Nothing is more unpardonable
than such disturbance.
During this winter a gentleman at one of the theatres commented severely
upon the loud talking of a party of ladies, which prevented his enjoyment
of the play, and when the gentleman attending the ladies retorted warmly,
the disturbed gentleman resorted to the wild justice of a blow. There was
an altercation, a publication in the newspapers, and finally an apology and
a reconciliation. But it is to be hoped that there was some good result
from the incident. A waggish clergyman once saw a pompous clerical brother
march quite to the head of the aisle of a crowded church to find a seat,
with an air of expectation that all pew-doors would fly open at his
approach. But as every seat was full, and nobody stirred, the crestfallen
brother was obliged to retrace his steps. As he retreated by the pew, far
down the aisle, where the clerical wag was sitting, that pleasant man
leaned over the door, and greeted his comrade with the sententious whisper,
"May it be sanctified to you, dear brother!" Every right-minded man will
wish the same blessing to the rebuke of the loud-talking maids and youths
in theatres and concert-halls, whose conversation, however lively, is not
the entertainment which their neighbors have come to hear.
Two or three winters ago the Easy Chair applauded the conduct of Mr.
Thomas, who, at the head of his orchestra, was interrupted in the midst of
a concert in Washington by the entry of a party, which advanced towards the
front of the hall with much chattering and rustling, and seated themselves
and continued the disturbance. The orchestra was in full career, but
Thomas rapped sharply upon his stand, and brought the performance to an
abrupt pause. Then, turning to the audience, he said--and doubtless with
evident and natural feeling: "I am afraid that the music interrupts the
conversation." The remark was greeted with warm and general applause; and,
waiting until entire silence was restored, the conductor raised his baton
again, and the performance ended without further interruption.
The Easy Chair improved the occasion to preach a short sermon upon bad
manners in public places. But to its great surprise it was severely rebuked
some time afterward by Cleopatra herself, who said, with some feeling, that
she had two reasons for complaint. The first was, that her ancient friend
the Easy Chair should place her in the pillory of its public animadversion;
and the other was, that the Easy Chair should gravely defend such conduct
as that of Mr. Thomas. No remonstrance could be more surprising and nothing
more unexpected than that Cleopatra should differ in opinion upon such a
point. To the personal aspect of the matter the Easy Chair could say only
that it had never heard who the offenders were, and that it declined to
believe that Cleopatra herself could ever be guilty of such conduct. Her
Majesty then explained that she was not guilty. She was not of the party.
But it was composed of friends of hers who seated themselves near her, and
when the words of Mr. Thomas concentrated the gaze of the audience upon the
disturbers of the peace, her Majesty, known to everybody, was supposed to
be the ringleader of the _emeute_. The story at once flew abroad, upon
the wings of those swift birds of prey--as she called them--the Washington
correspondents, and she was mentioned by name as the chief offender.
It was not difficult to persuade the most placable of queens that the Easy
Chair could not have intended a personal censure. But the Chair could not
agree that Thomas's conduct was unjustifiable. Cleopatra urged that the
conductor of an orchestra at a concert is not responsible for the behavior
of the audience. An audience, she said, can take care of itself, and it is
an unwarrantable impertinence for a conductor to arrest the performance
because he is irritated by a noise of whispering voices or of slamming
doors. "I saw you, Mr. Easy Chair," she said, "on the evening of Rachel's
first performance in this country. What would you have thought if she had
stopped short in the play--it was Corneille's _Les Horaces_, you
remember--because she was annoyed by the rustling of the leaves of a
thousand books of the play which the audience turned over at the same
moment?"
The Easy Chair declined to step into the snare which was plainly set in its
sight. It would not accept an illustration as an argument. The enjoyment at
a concert, it contended, for which the audience has paid in advance, and to
which it is entitled, depends upon conditions of silence and order which
it can not itself maintain without serious disturbance. It may indeed cry
"Hush!" and "Put him out!" but not only would that cry be of doubtful
effect, but experience proves that a concert audience will not raise it. If
the audience were left to itself, it would permit late arrivals, and all
the disturbance of chatter and movement. To twist the line of Goldsmith,
those who came to pray would be at the mercy of those who came to scoff;
and such mercy is merciless. The conductor stands _in loco parentis_.
He is the _advocatus angeli_. He does for the audience what it would
not do for itself. He protects it against its own fatal good-nature. He
insists that it shall receive what it has paid for, and he will deal with
disturbers as they deserve. The audience, conscious of its own good-humored
impotence, recognizes at once its protector, and gladly applauds him for
doing for it what it has not the nerve to do for itself. No audience whose
rights were defended as Thomas defended those of his Washington audience
ever resented the defence.
"No," responded Cleopatra, briskly; "the same imbecility prevents."
"Very well; then such an audience plainly needs a strong and resolute
leadership; and that is precisely what Thomas supplied. A crowd is always
grateful to the man who will do what everybody in the crowd feels ought to
be done, but what no individual is quite ready to undertake."
When Cleopatra said that an audience is quite competent to take care of
itself, her remark was natural, for she instinctively conceived the
audience as herself extended into a thousand persons. Such an audience
would certainly be capable of dispensing with any mentor or guide. But when
the Easy Chair asked her if she was annoyed by the chattering interruption
which Thomas rebuked, she replied that of course she was annoyed. Yet
when she was further asked if she cried "Hush!" or resorted to any means
whatever to quell the disturbance, the royal lady could not help smiling as
she answered, "I did not," and the Easy Chair retorted, "Yet an audience is
capable of protecting itself!"
Meanwhile, whatever the conductor or the audience may or may not do,
nothing is more vulgar than audible conversation, or any other kind of
disturbance, during a concert. Sometimes it may be mere thoughtlessness;
sometimes boorishness, the want of the fine instinct which avoids
occasioning any annoyance; but usually it is due to a desire to attract
attention and to affect superiority to the common interest. It is, indeed,
mere coarse ostentation, like wearing diamonds at a hotel table or a purple
velvet train in the street. If the audience had the courage which Cleopatra
attributed to it, that part which was annoyed by the barbarians who chatter
and disturb would at once suppress the annoyance by an emphatic and
unmistakable hiss. If this were the practice in public assemblies, such
incidents as that at the Washington concert would be unknown. Until
it is the practice, even were Cleopatra's self the offender, every
self-respecting conductor who has a proper sense of his duties to the
audience will do with its sincere approval what Mr. Thomas did.
(_April_, 1883)
WOMAN'S DRESS
The American who sits in a street omnibus or railroad-car and sees a young
woman whose waist is pinched to a point that makes her breathing mere
panting and puffing, and whose feet are squeezed into shoes with a high
heel in the middle of the sole, which compels her to stump and hobble as
she tries to walk, should be very wary of praising the superiority of
European and American civilization to that of the East. The grade of
civilization which squeezes a waist into deformity is not, in that respect
at least, superior to that which squeezes a foot into deformity. It is in
both instances a barbarous conception alike of beauty and of the function
of woman. The squeezed waist and the squeezed foot equally assume that
distortion of the human frame may be beautiful, and that helpless idleness
is the highest sphere of woman.
But the imperfection of our Western civilization shows itself in more
serious forms involving women. The promiscuous herding of men and women
prisoners in jails, the opposition to reformatories and penitentiaries
exclusively for women, and, in general, the failure to provide, as a matter
of course, women attendants and women nurses for all women prisoners and
patients, is a signal illustration of a low tone of civilization. The most
revolting instance of this abuse was the discovery during the summer that
the patients in a woman's insane hospital in New Orleans were bathed by
male attendants.
It should not need such outrages to apprise us of the worth of the general
principle that humanity and decency require that in all public institutions
women should be employed in the care of women. A wise proposition during
the year to provide women at the police-stations for the examination of
women who are arrested failed to become law. It is hard, upon the merits of
the proposal, to understand why. Women who are arrested may be criminals,
or drunkards, or vagabonds, or insane, or witless, or sick. But whatever
the reason of the arrest, there can be no good reason whatever, in a truly
civilized community, that a woman taken under such circumstances should be
abandoned to personal search and examination by the kind of men to whom
that business is usually allotted. The surest sign of the civilization
of any community is its treatment of women, and the progress of our
civilization is shown by the constant amelioration of that condition. But
the unreasonable and even revolting circumstances of much of the public
treatment of them may wisely modify ecstasies over our vast superiority.
The squeezed waists and other tokens of the kind show that our civilization
has not yet outgrown the conception of the most meretricious epochs, that
woman exists for the delight of man, and is meant to be a kind of decorated
appendage of his life, while the men attendants and men nurses of women
prisoners and patients show a most uncivilized disregard of the just
instincts of sex. We are far from asserting that therefore the position of
women in this country is to be likened to their position in China, where
the contempt of men denied them souls, or to that among savage tribes,
where they are treated as beasts of burden. But because we are not
wallowing in the Slough of Despond, it does not follow that we are sitting
in the House Beautiful. The traveller who has climbed to the _mer de
glace_ at Chamouni, and sees the valley wide outstretched far below him,
sees also far above him the awful sunlit dome of "Sovran Blanc." Whatever
point we may have reached, there is still a higher point to gain. Nowhere
in the world are women so truly respected as here, nowhere ought they to be
more happy than in this country. But that is no reason that the New Orleans
outrage should be possible, while the same good sense and love of justice
which have removed so many barriers to fair-play for women should press on
more cheerfully than ever to remove those that remain.
(_December_, 1882)
SECRET SOCIETIES
The melancholy death of young Mr. Leggett, a student at the Cornell
University, has undoubtedly occasioned a great deal of thought in every
college in the country upon secret societies. Professor Wilder, of Cornell,
has written a very careful and serious letter, in which he strongly opposes
them, plainly stating their great disadvantages, and citing the order
of Jesuits as the most powerful and thoroughly organized of all secret
associations, and therefore the one in which their character and tendency
may best be observed. The debate recalls the history of the Antimasonic
excitement in this country, which is, however, seldom mentioned in recent
years, so that the facts may not be familiar to the reader.
In the year 1826 William Morgan, living in Batavia, in the western part of
New York, near Buffalo, was supposed to intend the publication of a book
which would reveal the secrets of Masonry. The Masons in the vicinity were
angry, and resolved to prevent the publication, and made several forcible
but ineffective attempts for that purpose. On the 11th of September, 1826,
a party of persons from Canandaigua came to Batavia and procured the arrest
of Morgan upon a criminal charge, and he was carried to Canandaigua for
examination. He was acquitted, but was immediately arrested upon a civil
process, upon which an execution was issued, and he was imprisoned in the
jail at Canandaigua. The next evening he was discharged at the instance of
those who had caused his arrest, and was taken from the jail after nine
o'clock in the evening. Those who had obtained the discharge instantly
seized him, gagged and bound him, and throwing him into a carriage, hurried
off to Rochester. By relays of horses and by different hands he was borne
along, until he was lodged in the magazine of Fort Niagara, at the mouth of
the Niagara River.
The circumstances of his arrest, and those that had preceded it,
had aroused and inflamed the minds of the people in Batavia and the
neighborhood. A committee was appointed at a public meeting to ascertain
all the facts, and to bring to justice any criminals that might be found.
They could discover only that Morgan had been seized upon his discharge in
Canandaigua and hurried off towards Rochester; but beyond that, nothing.
The excitement deepened and spread. A great crime had apparently been
committed, and it was hidden in absolute secrecy. Other meetings were held
in other towns, and other committees were appointed, and both meetings and
committees were composed of men of both political parties. Investigation
showed that Masons only were implicated in the crime, and that scarcely a
Mason aided the inquiry; that many Masons ridiculed and even justified the
offence; that the committees were taunted with their inability to procure
the punishment of the offenders in courts where judges, sheriffs, juries,
and witnesses were Masons; that witnesses disappeared; that the committees
were reviled; and gradually Masonry itself was held responsible for the
mysterious doom of Morgan.
The excitement became a frenzy. The Masons were hated and denounced as the
Irish were in London after the "Irish night," or the Roman Catholics during
the Titus Oates fury. In January, 1827, some of those who had been arrested
were tried, and it was hoped that the evidence at their trials would clear
the mystery. But they pleaded guilty, and this hope was baffled. Meanwhile
a body of delegates from the various committees met at Lewiston to
ascertain the fate of Morgan, and they discovered that in or near the
magazine in which he had been confined he had been put to death. His book,
with its revelations, had been published, and what was not told was, of
course, declared to be infinitely worse than the actual disclosures. The
excitement now became political. It was alleged that Masonry held itself
superior to the laws, and that Masons were more loyal to their Masonic
oaths than to their duty as citizens. Masonry, therefore, was held to be a
fatal foe to the government and to the country, which must be destroyed;
and in several town-meetings in Genesee and Monroe counties, in the spring
of 1827, Masons, as such, were excluded from office. At the next general
election the Antimasons nominated a separate ticket, and they carried the
counties of Genesee, Monroe, Livingston, Orleans, and Niagara against both
the great parties. A State organization followed, and in the election
of 1830 the Antimasonic candidate, Francis Granger, was adopted by the
National Republicans, and received one hundred and twenty thousand votes,
against one hundred and twenty-eight thousand for Mr. Throop. From a State
organization the Antimasons became a national party, and in 1832 nominated
William Wirt for the presidency. The Antimasonic electoral ticket was
adopted by the National Republicans, and the union became the Whig party,
which, in 1838, elected Mr. Seward Governor of New York, and in 1840
General Harrison President of the United States.
The spring of this triumphant political movement was hostility to a secret
society. Many of the most distinguished political names of Western New
York, including Millard Fillmore, William H. Seward, Thurlow Weed, Francis
Granger, James Wadsworth, George W. Patterson, were associated with it. And
as the larger portion of the Whig party was merged in the Republican, the
dominant party of to-day has a certain lineal descent from the feelings
aroused by the abduction of Morgan from the jail at Canandaigua. And as
his disappearance and the odium consequent upon it stigmatized Masonry, so
that it lay for a long time moribund, and although revived in later years,
cannot hope to regain its old importance, so the death of young Leggett is
likely to wound fatally the system of college secret societies.
The young man was undergoing initiation into a secret society. He was
blind-folded, and two companions were leading him along the edge of a cliff
over a deep ravine, when the earth gave way, or they slipped and fell from
the precipice, and Leggett was so injured that he died in two hours. There
was no allegation or suspicion of blame. There was, indeed, an attempt of
some enemies of the Cornell University--a hostility due either to supposed
conflict of interests or sectarian jealousy--to stigmatize the institution,
but it failed instantly and utterly. Indeed, General Leggett, of the
Patent-office in Washington, the father of the unfortunate youth, at once
wrote a very noble and touching letter to shield the university and the
companions of his son from blame or responsibility. He would not allow his
grief to keep him silent when a word could avert injustice, and his modest
magnanimity won for his sorrow the tender sympathy of all who read his
letter.
Every collegian knows that there is no secrecy whatever in what is called
a secret society. Everybody knows, not in particular, but in general,
that its object is really "good-fellowship," with the charm of mystery
added. Everybody knows--for the details of such societies in all countries
are essentially the same--that there are certain practical jokes of
initiation--tossings in blankets, layings in coffins, dippings in cold
water, stringent catechisms, moral exhortations, with darkness and sudden
light and mysterious voices from forms invisible, and then mystic signs
and clasps and mottoes, "the whole to conclude" with the best supper that
the treasury can afford. Literary brotherhood, philosophic fraternity,
intellectual emulation, these are the noble names by which the youth
deceive themselves and allure the Freshmen; but the real business of the
society is to keep the secret, and to get all the members possible from the
entering class.
Each society, of course, gets "the best fellows." Every touter informs the
callow Freshman that all men of character and talent hasten to join his
society, and impresses the fresh imagination with the names of the famous
honorary members. The Freshman, if he be acute--and he is more so every
year--naturally wonders how the youth, who are undeniably commonplace in
the daily intercourse of college, should become such lofty beings in the
hall of a secret society; or, more probably, he thinks of nothing but the
sport or the mysterious incentive to a studious and higher life which the
society is to furnish. He feels the passionate curiosity of the neophyte.
He is smitten with the zeal of the hermetical philosophy. He would learn
more than Rosicrucian lore. That is a vision soon dispelled. But the
earnest curiosity changes into _esprit du corps_, and the mischief is
that the secrecy and the society feeling are likely to take precedence of
the really desirable motives in college. There is a hundredfold greater
zeal to obtain members than there is generous rivalry among the societies
to carry off the true college honors. And if the purpose be admirable, why,
as Professor Wilder asks, the secrecy? What more can the secret society
do for the intellectual or social training of the student than the open
society? Has any secret society in an American college done, or can it do,
more for the intelligent and ambitious young man than the Union Debating
Society at the English Cambridge University, or the similar club at Oxford?
There Macaulay, Gladstone, the Austins, Charles Buller, Tooke, Ellis, and
the long illustrious list of noted and able Englishmen were trained, and
in the only way that manly minds can be trained, by open, free, generous
rivalry and collision. The member of a secret society in college is really
confined, socially and intellectually, to its membership, for it is found
that the secret gradually supplant the open societies. But that membership
depends upon luck, not upon merit, while it has the capital disadvantage
of erecting false standards of measurement, so that the _Mu Nu_ man
cannot be just to the hero of _Zeta Eta_. The secrecy is a spice that
overbears the food. The mystic paraphernalia is a relic of the baby-house,
which a generous youth disdains.
There is, indeed, an agreeable sentiment in the veiled friendship of the
secret society which every social nature understands. But as students
are now becoming more truly "men" as they enter college, because of the
higher standard of requirement, it is probable that the glory of the
secret society is already waning, and that the allegiance of the older
universities to the open arenas of frank and manly intellectual contests,
involving no expense, no dissipation, and no perilous temptation, is
returning. At least there will now be an urgent question among many of the
best men in college whether it ought not to return.
(_January_, 1874)
TOBACCO AND HEALTH
We do not know if readers upon your side of the water have watched with
any interest the present violent onslaught in both England and France upon
the use of tobacco. Sir Benjamin Brodie (of London) has declared strongly
against its use; and at a recent meeting at Edinburgh of the British
Anti-Tobacco Society, Professor Miller, moving the first resolution, as
follows: "That as the constituent principles which tobacco contains are
highly poisonous, the practices of smoking and snuffing tend in a variety
of ways to injure the physical and mental constitution," continued: "No man
who was a hard smoker had a steady hand. But not only had it a debilitating
and paralyzing effect; but he could tell of patients who were completely
paralyzed in their limbs by inveterate smoking. He might tell of a
patient of his who brought on an attack of paralysis by smoking; who was
cured, indeed, by simple means enough, accompanied with the complete
discontinuance of the practice; but who afterwards took to it again, and
got a new attack of paralysis; and who could now play with himself, as it
were, because when he wanted a day's paralysis or an approach to it, he
had nothing to do but to indulge more or less freely with the weed. Only
the other day, the French--among whom the practice was carried even to
a greater extent than with us--made an estimate of its effects in their
schools, and academies, and colleges. They took the young men attending
these institutions, classified them into those who smoked habitually and
those who did not, and estimated their physical and intellectual standing,
perhaps their moral standing too, but he could not say. The result was,
that they found that those who did not smoke were the stronger lads and
better scholars, were altogether more reputable people, and more useful
members of society than those who habitually used the drug. What was
the consequence? Louis Napoleon--one of the good things which he had
done--instantly issued an edict that no smoking should be permitted in any
school, college, or academy. In one day he put out about 30,000 pipes in
Paris alone. Let our young smokers put that in their pipe and smoke it."
The resolution was agreed to.