THE AMERICAN FAMILY

From ‘Outre-Mer’

As the American marriage appears to be above all a partnership, so the American family appears to be more than anything else an association,—­a sort of social camp, the ties of which are more or less strong according to individual sympathies, such as might exist between people not of the same blood.  I am certain, not from anecdotes but from experience, that the friendship of brother and brother, or sister and sister, is entirely elective.  So it is with the relations between father and son, mother and daughter.  A young Frenchman much in love with a New York girl said to me, in one of those moments when the coldness of the woman you love drives you to be cruelly frank:—­

“She has so little heart that she went to the theatre five weeks after her mother’s death, and no one resented it.”

I knew that he was telling the truth.  But what did it prove?  What do the inequalities permitted by the laws of inheritance prove?  Nothing, if not that our natural characteristics, instincts, sensibilities, are not the same as those of the people of this country.  They have much less power of self-giving, much more of personal reaction; and especially a much stronger will.  Their will rules their hearts as well as their minds.  This seems to us less tender.  But are we good judges?

We must continually keep in mind this general want of association in family life if we would in any degree understand the sort of soul-celibacy, if we may use the term, which the American woman keeps all through her married life.  No more in this second period of her life than in the first does love bear that preponderating part which seems to us Frenchmen an essential characteristic of the lot of woman.  When a Parisian woman of forty reviews her life, the story that memory tells her is the story of her emotions.  To an American woman of the same age it is more often the story of her actions,—­of what she calls, by a word I have before cited, her experiences.  She gained, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, a conception of her own self which was imposed upon her neither by her traditions—­she has none; nor by the instructions of her parents—­they never gave her any; nor even by her own nature—­for it is characteristic of these easily “adaptable” minds that their first instincts are chaotic and undetermined.  They are like a blank check, which the will undertakes to fill out.  But whatever the will writes upon it, is written in letters that will never be effaced.  Action, action, always action,—­this is the remorseless but unchanging device of such a woman.  Whether she seeks for a place in society, or is ambitious for artistic culture, or addicts herself to sport, or organizes “classes,” as they say, for reading Browning, Emerson, or Shakespeare, with her friends; whether she travels to Europe, India, or Japan, or gives an “at home” to have some young girl among her friends “pour” tea for her, be sure that she will be always and incessantly active, indefatigably active, either in the lines of “refinement” or of “excitement.”