A Traveler From Altruria. William Dean Howells
joke.”
“Oh, have you a national joke?” asked the Altrurian. “But, of course! You have so much humor. I wish you could give me some notion of it.”
“Well, it is rather damaging to any joke to explain it,” I replied, “and your only hope of getting at ours is to live into it. One feature of it is the confusion of foreigners at the sight of our men’s willingness to subordinate themselves to our women.”
“Oh, I don’t find that very bewildering,” said the Altrurian. “It seems to me a generous and manly trait of the American character. I’m proud to say that it is one of the points at which your civilization and our own touch. There can be no doubt that the influence of women in your public affairs must be of the greatest advantage to you; it has been so with us.”
I turned and stared at him, but he remained insensible to my astonishment, perhaps because it was now too dark for him to see it. “Our women have no influence in public affairs,” I said, quietly, after a moment.
“They haven’t? Is it possible? But didn’t I understand you to imply just now that your women were better educated than your men?”
“Well, I suppose that, taking all sorts and conditions among us, the women are as a rule better schooled, if not better educated.”
“Then, apart from the schooling, they are not more cultivated?”
“In a sense you might say they were. They certainly go in for a lot of things: art and music, and Browning and the drama, and foreign travel and psychology, and political economy and Heaven knows what all. They have more leisure for it; they have all the leisure there is, in fact; our young men have to go into business. I suppose you may say our women are more cultivated than our men; yes, I think there’s no questioning that. They are the great readers among us. We poor devils of authors would be badly off if it were not for our women. In fact, no author could make a reputation among us without them. American literature exists because American women appreciate it and love it.”
“But surely your men read books?”
“Some of them; not many, comparatively. You will often hear a complacent ass of a husband and father say to an author: ‘My wife and daughters know your books, but I can’t find time for anything but the papers nowadays. I skim them over at breakfast, or when I’m going in to business on the train.’ He isn’t the least ashamed to say that he reads nothing but the newspapers.”
“Then you think that it would be better for him to read books?”
“Well, in the presence of four or five thousand journalists with drawn scalping-knives I should not like to say so. Besides, modesty forbids.”
“No, but, really,” the Altrurian persisted, “you think that the literature of a book is more carefully pondered than the literature of a daily newspaper?”
“I suppose even the four or five thousand journalists with drawn scalping-knives would hardly deny that.”
“And it stands to reason, doesn’t it, that the habitual reader of carefully pondered literature ought to be more thoughtful than the readers of literature which is not carefully pondered and which they merely skim over on their way to business?”
“I believe we began by assuming the superior culture of our women, didn’t we? You’ll hardly find an American that isn’t proud of it.”
“Then,” said the Altrurian, “if your women are generally better schooled than your men, and more cultivated and more thoughtful, and are relieved of household work in such great measure, and even of domestic cares, why have they no part in your public affairs?”
I laughed, for I thought I had my friend at last. “For the best of all possible reasons: they don’t want it.”
“Ah, that’s no reason,” he returned. “Why don’t they want it?”
“Really,” I said, out of all patience, “I think I must let you ask the ladies themselves,” and I turned and moved again toward the hotel, but the Altrurian gently detained me.
“Excuse me,” he began.
“No, no,” I said.
“‘The feast is set, the guests are met,
May’st hear the merry din.’
Come in and see the young people dance.”
“Wait,” he entreated; “tell me a little more about the old people first. This digression about the ladies has been very interesting, but I thought you were going to speak of the men here. Who are they, or, rather, what are they?”
“Why, as I said before, they are all business men and professional men; people who spend their lives in studies and counting-rooms and offices, and have come up here for a few weeks or a few days of well-earned repose. They are of all kinds of occupations: they are lawyers and doctors, and clergymen and merchants, and brokers and bankers. There’s hardly any calling you Won’t find represented among them. As I was thinking just now, our hotel is a sort of microcosm of the American republic.”
“I am most fortunate in finding you here, where I can avail myself of your intelligence in making my observations of your life under such advantageous circumstances. It seems to me that with your help I might penetrate the fact of American life, possess myself of the mystery of your national joke, without stirring beyond the piazza of your hospitable hotel,” said my friend. I doubted it, but one does not lightly put aside a compliment like that to one’s intelligence, and I said I should be very happy to be of use to him. He thanked me, and said: “Then, to begin with, I understand that these gentlemen are here because they are all overworked.”
“Of course. You can have no conception of how hard our business men and our professional men work. I suppose there is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. But, as I said before, we are beginning to find that we cannot burn the candle at both ends and have it last long. So we put one end out for a little while every summer. Still, there are frightful wrecks of men strewn all along the course of our prosperity, wrecks of mind and body. Our insane asylums are full of madmen who have broken under the tremendous strain, and every country in Europe abounds in our dyspeptics.” I was rather proud of this terrible fact; there is no doubt but we Americans are proud of overworking ourselves; Heaven knows why.
The Altrurian murmured: “Awful! Shocking!” But I thought somehow he had not really followed me very attentively in my celebration of our national violation of the laws of life and its consequences. “I am glad,” he went on, “that your business men and professional men are beginning to realize the folly and wickedness of overwork. Shall I find some of your other weary workers here, too?”
“What other weary workers?” I asked in turn, for I imagined I had gone over pretty much the whole list.
“Why,” said the Altrurian, “your mechanics and day laborers, your iron-moulders and glass-blowers, your miners and farmers, your printers and mill-operatives, your trainmen and quarry-hands. Or do they prefer to go to resorts of their own?”
III
It was not easy to make sure of such innocence as prompted this inquiry of my Altrurian friend. The doubt whether he could really be in earnest was something that I had already felt; and it was destined to beset me, as it did now, again and again. My first thought was that, of course, he was trying a bit of cheap irony on me, a mixture of the feeble sarcasm and false sentiment that makes us smile when we find it in the philippics of the industrial agitators. For a moment I did not know but I had fallen victim to a walking delegate on his vacation, who was employing his summer leisure in going about the country in the guise of a traveler from Altruria, and foisting himself upon people who would have had nothing to do with him in his real