Most people of the white race may learn from the Indian in the matter of affectation. Few of us are simple and natural in our social manners. My own family often joke me, when, in answering the telephone, I respond in what they call my “dressy tone.” The other day a lady, whose husband is a college professor, mistook me for a distinguished eastern psychologist whose surname happens to be the same as mine. Until she discovered her mistake she “minced and mouthed” in a most ludicrous fashion (how I wish she could have seen herself as I saw her!) merely because she thought I was a prominent man in the field wherein her husband was a more humble member. The criticism on my own “dressy tone” is a perfectly just one. I find myself, often, “putting on style” because I want to appear “my best.” After due consideration I have decided to confess that—like most people—I have a variety of “celluloid smiles” which unconsciously I put on or off as occasion requires. We are not simple, not natural in our relationships one with another. We feel that we must “make an impression,” that we must “appear well.” The result is we are unnatural, affected, often deceptive, and many a time disagreeable. Affectation in speech and manner is always a sign of mental meanness,—of what is commonly called vulgarity, and is never to be commended but is always to be condemned. On the other hand, if the President of the United The white race, too, is fearfully affected in its pretense at knowing more than it can know. We are all ashamed to say, “I don’t know!” I believe this applies more truthfully to women than to men. Since the era of the woman’s club, the gentle sex has been wild to accumulate knowledge, and sadly too often, it is content to appear to have the knowledge rather than appear ignorant. One has but to look over the programs of a score or a hundred women’s clubs, as I have recently done, to see proof of this in the vast range many of them take in a single season. They crowd into an hour’s or two hours’ session what no person living can get a reasonable grasp of in less than from three months to a year of fairly consistent and persistent study. They jump from “The Romantic School of Music,” one week to “The Effect of the Renaissance upon Gothic Art,” the next, and the third Yet let it not be thought that I am not a believer in education for women, women’s clubs, and the like. I believe in everything that really helps. And if these clubs would compel mental exercise enough to give a fair grasp of one subject a year, they would be doing work of incalculable benefit. But this smattering of knowledge, this thin spreading out of scraps of information, feed no one’s mind, and the pretense that comes from an assumed knowledge does the mind and soul of the pretender more harm than a dozen clubs can eradicate in a lifetime. Hence, let us become simple-minded, as the Indians. They “don’t know,” and they know they don’t know, and they are willing to say so. There is another affectation to which I must refer. We Americans pretend to be democratic, yet we have a caste of wealth that is more disgusting, degrading, and demoralizing than the Hindoo castes, or the social scale of European aristocracy. We “kow tow” to an English lord as if he were a little god, and we bow and scrape and mince our words when we come in contact with the nouveau riche of our own land, just as if they were made of different material from ourselves. The space given in our newspapers to the most trivial doings of Alice Roosevelt, both before and after she married Congressman Longworth; the recital of the actions of the “society” few,—the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds, Carnegies, Harrimans, Fishes, and the rest,—are proofs of our affected snobbism. |