My Dear Cornelia/Book 2/Chapter 3
"Don't you see," she continued, as we came over the brow of a little hill, "why I can't have Dorothy reading these current novels? I don't wish her to be what this creature calls 'elemental' and 'spontaneous.' I wish her to be civilized and rational—and not a well-dressed little savage, ready to act at once on whatever passion or fancy or circumstances put into her head. I wish her to associate with people who are rational and civilized, and, when she marries, I wish her to marry a man who is civilized and rational. Do you know, that in the course of the last year I have met just one man in fiction who seems to have retained elements of the ideas of a gentleman,—or rather, one man and his father,—I mean the hero of Struthers Burt's The Interpreter's House. As for Mr. Burt's women, they are almost as uncivilized as anybody's."
"Isn't there a season of life," I suggested, "in which almost everyone has some uncivilized promptings?"
"Is there a season in life," countered Cornelia, "when a properly trained person cannot present at least the appearance of discretion?"
"My dear Cornelia," I said, "do you ever glance through those columns in our great national fireside magazines, in which wise old editors converse with their contributors and advise young girls how to catch a man?"
Cornelia smiled, and then abruptly became very firm and grave. "That is it," she said. "That is exactly it—'how to catch a man'! And the dreadful thing is that the tone of our entire popular discussion and our popular literature is just about at that level—as if the mere possession of anything in the shape of a man were so unquestionably desirable that no scruple must be raised regarding his family and social position, his religion and principles of personal conduct, his property and prospects and professional standing. We are becoming absurd in our carelessness about such matters."
"But that," I protested, "is just what makes the beauty of life in America."
"That," said Cornelia, "is what makes American life so ugly—no respect for any of the things that make people respectable, no sense for the substantial basis of social distinctions, no regard for the hedges and barriers behind which one tries to cultivate the flowers of a finer garden."
"That," I said, "is the really decisive evidence of our freedom from snobbishness."
"It is the decisive evidence," said Cornelia, "of our deficiency in taste."
"You lack patience," I persisted. "It is the new social wisdom of democracy."
"It is the new social idiocy of democracy," she replied; "and let me assure you there is none of it in my house. If I lack patience, I possess some experience. I was taught by my mother to be kind and considerate to servants—my old nurse loved me like a daughter. And I was taught at home and in church to be charitable to poor people and ignorant people and people without advantages and without manners. But I was also brought up to believe that a nice girl had better be dead than form a sentimental relationship with one who was not in her class—not a gentleman."
"Don't you think that is—a rather silly and outworn prejudice?" I ventured.
"I certainly do not," she replied. "I think the salvation of a girl is her pride—legitimate pride in her family, her position, her connections. I have conscientiously striven to train my daughter to feel that, so far as her personal fortunes are concerned, common people—that is, vulgar ordinary people—simply are not in the world. Call it snobbishness, if you like; I am proud of it."
"But Cornelia," I said, "can't you concede that in the relation we are discussing, there is something more elemental and imperative than can be governed by such considerations as you put foremost?"
"Yes—to the sense of animals and savages. Yes—to the sense of vulgar and ignorant people. To the sense of what my mother used to call gentlefolk—emphatically, No. To them, there can be nothing more elemental and imperative than just those considerations which distinguish them from the ignorant and the vulgar."
"You yourself have half apologized for the old word, 'gentlefolk,'" I nagged. "Please tell me what gentlefolk were, or rather, what a gentleman is. Must he belong to the Church and be a member of the militia? For how many generations must he be able to trace his family? How much money must he have in the bank? How much of the Decalogue and how many rules for perfect behavior may he break in a day, without losing caste? Are you quite clear about all this?"
"You have a very irritating way," said Cornelia, "of trying to make the most sensible and obvious positions absurd to maintain. But you know I am right. You know that there is nothing absurd in being conscious of the claims of the Church and the State and the established system of morals and manners. You know there is nothing absurd in being conscious of the significance of money in enabling one to take and maintain a position of dignity and influence. A man has no dignity nor influence until he enters relations with the instituted and continuing forms of society. And though silly little girls may think they could spend a happy lifetime 'traipsing' after a gipsy minstrel, a wife knows better. Every married woman knows that a husband without dignity or influence is a perpetual humiliation."
"Very possibly," I said; "but you were going to define a gentleman."
"Why, a gentleman," said Cornelia, "is a man so well bred and so intelligent that he knows what I have just been saying, without being told; consequently he doesn't ask a nice girl to marry him if he is aware that he can offer her nothing but perpetual humiliation. A gentleman is a man whose character has been formed by the standards of civilized and rational people. To him these considerations are so elementary and so familiar that he acts upon them spontaneously."
"Then you would admit," I suggested, a little petulantly, "that what a man is, after he is a vestryman, an officer in the militia, and a property-holder, may have a certain remote bearing on—on the felicity of a marriage, if you think that of any importance?"
"Of course I think that of importance," responded Cornelia. "Don't be foolish. I am discussing the conditions in which felicity begins to be possible. You recall what Henry James says so beautifully: 'The object of money is to enable one to forget it.' In the whole course of my life, I believe I was never before hectored into saying so flatly what the prerequisites of a decent marriage are. But you and your novelist friends—you realists, as you call yourselves—have filled the world with the glorification of merely instinctive and utterly irrational 'matings,' or with childish sentimentality about them; so that now, when I talk with Dorothy about suitable and unsuitable marriages, I find myself obliged to reconstruct for her the very rudiments of common-sense."
I do not consider Cornelia subtle, but sometimes she says the same things that she would say if she were subtle. However, if I was being instructed over the head of her daughter, I did not propose to acknowledge it. "My dear Cornelia," I remonstrated, "do you forget that I am not Dorothy?"
"No," she said, "but I often think you are just as sentimental."