THE SOCIAL SPOTTER.
Reading edition
“Why don’t the young folks marry?” continues, in the intervals of other jeremiad problems, to puzzle the good people who call themselves publicists, having a brevet authority to set everything right in the world. It is assumed that if the young people would only marry up to the full proportion, most of the ills that afflict an over-civilized and over-sensitized society would cure themselves. The young people would have something else to do besides “dabbling in the fount of fictive tears” and inventing new wants. The old ones would suffice, when multiplied in kind after the usual fashion.
It is an old story that young men are afraid of the cost of marriage. The girls are less simple than their mothers and complexity in matters of taste means expense. A clever verse writer has told of the hardships of a pair who wooed on a bicycle built for two and afterwards tried to live on a salary built for one. It is funny in the telling but tragic in the living. It is a trying business to keep up to concert pitch in these days.
But is she warranted harmless?
The complexity of social expression is not the only dragon in the way. We have adopted from abroad something French. It came via England, but France is its origin. It is the Chaperone. She is usually harmless personally, but she means a great deal. She stands for a state of society where marriage is always a failure. Ask Emile Zola if you don’t believe it. “Modern Marriage” has the specifications. We have good women and manly men in America. The grisette isn’t an institution with us. Neither is the man who supports her until he is rich enough to make a French marriage. We have him and we have her, but neither is universal. The mariage de convenance and the institution which precedes it in France are not general with us. The chaperone is part of the system with them. The chaperone implies the others. She is a standing notice that young man and young woman are not to be trusted together. In some of our cities it is such very good “good form” to send a guardian with young people that a woman of over twenty-five has been known to cancel an engagement to attend a company which she had anxiously wanted to enjoy and for which she had made great preparation, because a married sister could not accompany her. She would not go without a chaperone. It was not “good form.”
O ye gods, Good Form! What was good form, and who promulgated its laws, when the father and mother of us all, better than any of us, walked with the Creator of the universe in the garden in the cool of the day? But “evil came into the world” and changed it. Yes, the evil of “good form,” the embodied self-consciousness which chains all the virtues and makes the decencies compulsory and puts on them the brand of the police blotter.
In the name of all that is good why should we watch the young people? The middle-aged need it more. Youth is chivalrous. Middle age is commonplace. It is not youth that
Eats for his stomach and drinks for his head, And loves for his pleasure—and ’tis time he was dead.
Chaperon the married victims of the French system. Put the spotter on the track of the woman who was taught she couldn’t trust herself when she was young and the man was complacently branded a roue when his heart was fresh and warm.
It is time for a new declaration of independence, and the youth of our land should make it. Let Young America say this: “The woman I cannot honorably woo, whose care at a social gathering is denied me without a policeman and a spy, may find another knight.” Let the maidens of our day, better cultured than their mothers, broader in their training, surer of their social footing, stronger in their poise and presence of mind, bar out the man who comes into their presence under a ban.
How long would the hollow mockery of “good form” endure such a strike? As many minutes as it should take to show its utter falsehood and the cruel slander it implies. Until the young people so assert themselves the imitated bars sinister of the most corrupt social heraldry of Europe will be ours—worn with an affectation of pride in the dishonor they blazon. Till then men will be equalized down, not up; and the talk of “emancipated woman” will be an insult. When it is done there will be more marriages of the kind to be desired—the union of true men and self-respecting women.
William McIntosh.
