Futurist Manners

I SOMETIMES marvel, among other causes for marvel, which seem to multiply with increasing years, at the myth regarding successive generations as standing for a certain sympathy in taste and in conviction. As the years go on, one is supposed to link one’s arm more and more closely into that of one’s own generation, marching on more bravely for being in step, glad of a companion whose stride measures up with one’s own, when all before and all after seem to obey a different music. As a matter of fact, for many years I have been searching for my generation, and nowhere can I find it. No quest of olden time could have been more elusive. Where shall one discover the philosopher’s stone? In what remote corner lay one’s finger upon the will-o’-the-wisp? Where shall one find one’s generation?

We grow older in diversely selective fashion, in our tangled human progress, the parts that change, the parts that stay stable, seldom coinciding with those of friend and relative. Hence it comes to pass that one has no exact contemporaries, merely shadowy companions whom one encounters at scattered instants, only to see them flit to far distances. An old friend, looking before and after, torn this way and that, comes to seem, to one whose choices are different, a conglomerate of his forbears and of his descendants. He who sides one moment with his greatgrandfather, the next with his greatgreat-grandchild, is a hard person to meet in any of those alleged trystingplaces of middle age, where a generation takes counsel with itself, and makes a certain stand between the old and the new.

This may account for my vast loneliness when I gaze at futurist things, — futurist pictures, futurist literature, futurist statues, futurist dances, upon one or another of which most of my supposed contemporaries look with complacency. I, who would repel with just indignation the suggestion that I had passed the time of growth, and had become hard and dry and unreceptive; who would claim that I wish to hold only that which was best in the past, while waiting for anything fine and new that the future has to offer, stand lost in uncomprehending dismay at much of the spectacle of life before me. Most dismayed of all am I in witnessing what I may perhaps designate as futurist manners, the new rough-and-tumble ways of our young, which have so little charm to my eyes, for I fail to share the approving mood of my contemporaries, their fond mothers and adoring fathers. What do the new tendencies mean i Is human nature here, like art, ‘recapturing its own essential madness?’

Our sons and daughters look odd to me when fully clad for athletics, and act as oddly. Something of the wild striding of the athletic field, the leaping, gyrating, hand-springing tendency is carried by stalwart, bare-headed youth of both sexes into urban districts, street and mart echoing to the whistles and the ringing cheers of our young men and maidens alike. There is a swiftness and dash, one might almost call it. an automobile manner, in their steady stride forward with no regard for obstacles. Recently I saw an old lady of eighty, one whose slender frailty clearly proclaimed her age, totter from the sidewalk to the gutter as she met a group of three young women abreast, striding as one. They were well groomed, more ‘gently dressed,’ however, than ‘gently bred,’ if I may use the words of a quaint old friend of mine. Apparently there was to them nothing unusual in the spectacle, and they went swinging on their way, while the old lady, wearing a look of joy, as if all that she claimed as her due lay in escaping destruction, climbed triumphantly back to the sidewalk. The scene has become a haunting, symbolic memory, an allegory of contemporary youth and age.

Just how far the new manners coincide in principle with other futurist things would be hard to say, but from subway stations, entrances to lecture halls, from the aimless hurry and struggle of theatre exits, comes many a memory suggestive of ‘ the malcoherence aforethought of the impressionist writer.’ Particularly upon the board walks of New England, —a great revealer of character, whether associated with academic institutions, sea-shore resorts, or suburban towns, — does one become aware of tendencies more than futurist, verging on cubist; for, when several maidens with intertwined arms bear heavily down, striking one in the shoulder with no word of apology, it is as if one had met a cubist picture face to face, and bore upon one’s person the marks of the contact.

It was at a lecture on the new movement in art that the likeness first struck me. The speaker was warming to his subject, when a futurist maiden, in a futurist skirt (no small feat in that costume), stepped over a high wooden partition that separated her from a desired seat. ‘The new movement,’ the lecturer was saying, ‘bears witness to the inner need of every man to express himself.’ Our new manners, like the new pictures, are also impressionist, subjective, and show us similarly unaware of the shapes and contours of the outer world; hence, many a bruise, many a strained muscle, many a trodden toe.

In contemporary conduct, as in modern art, we are aware of reaction from old standards, based upon considerations of general welfare, to an individualistic standard where, as the lecturer on futurist pictures said, it is ‘the duty of every man to strike out for himself.’ In life as in art this need of immediate self-expression is too often gratified at the expense of the laws of beauty and of order. The new pictures ‘ render directly the vibration or rhythm of life.’ So does a herd of stampeding cattle; so do our sons and daughters in the city streets. The futurist and post-impressionist pictures mean ‘a direct response to certain stimuli,’ we are told. Yes, but there are stimuli and stimuli, and the history of our civilization is but the history of our attempts to decide to which stimuli it is wise to respond. Alas, in regard to the new manners as in regard to the new pictures I stand confessed as one who fails to comprehend ‘ in the first shock of contact,’ and so will forever fail!

It is especially with reference to womankind that I find the new tendencies in manner most trying. ‘There his n’t the slightest doubt about it; might is right,’ quoted an imperialistic deck-steward, overheard on a recent voyage. It may be true, though I ‘ha’ ma doots’; and even if true, I should hate to see it become the slogan of embatt led womankind. What meaning will the term ‘gentlefolk,’ particularly ‘gentlewomen,’ have for future generations? Probably it will suggest an extinct species that died out in the process of the survival of the fittest. It is here that I part company with my generation; we are all conservatives and progressives at such odd angles that a mad geometrician would be as necessary to express us as to express The Procession, Seville, or The Dance at the Spring.

Those among my contemporaries who agree with me in questioning the manners of our daughters of to-day are precisely the ones who disagree with me in thinking that women should be allowed to use their minds, if they have them, in any way they can. I have known learned gentlewomen so exquisitely fine in manner that I can but believe that it would be possible to hold fast the older standards in regard to conduct and bearing, while permitting the wider opportunity in occupation and achievement. In other words, the athletic and the intellectual development of women do not seem to me inextricably connected in ideal theory as they are in practice. But eager as I am for the fuller intellectual life, I should rather go back to even eighteenth-century conditions than to have my sex make up so large a part of The Rude descending a Staircase.

I should promptly deny any insinuation that I am unprogressive; the fear of being unprogressive, by the way, is the one feeling in which all members of all generations now meet and agree. But I have uneasy moments of remembering, what I think many of our leaders are forgetting, that rapidity of motion and progress are not after all synonymous. One learns many things as a child in the country, and old memories of coasting remind me now and then that swiftness characterizes not ascent, but descent, — the swiftest progress of all being down hill.