Quotes of the Day (Samuel Butler and John Erskine, on Different Types of Females)

“All young ladies are either very pretty or very clever or very sweet; they may take their choice as to which category they will go in for, but go in for one of the three they must. It was hopeless to try and pass Charlotte off as either pretty or sweet. So she became clever as the only remaining alternative.”—Samuel Butler (1835-1902), The Way of All Flesh (1903)

“There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me.” —John Erskine, American author and educator (1879-1951).

Samuel Butler represents a dilemma for members of the “reality-based community”: How do you stereotype a writer as a religious mossback when all his life—even in the posthumously published novel that became his greatest work—he savages the clerical life at every turn? With his kind of perspective—not to mention the wit displayed in the above quote—you can’t.

After initial enthusiasm for The Origins of Species, Butler became increasingly disenchanted with Darwin’s take on it. Several of his mid-career tracts sought to reconcile will, intelligence and design to a world now under the sway of natural selection.

Judging from the sardonic passage above from The Way of All Flesh—one of many in the novel—I suspect that the novelist would have deduced Erskine’s quote as proof positive that Darwin was not infallible, in much the same way that Henry Adams pointed to the arc of American Presidents from George Washington to Ulysses S. Grant as evidence of the same phenomenon.

Butler, at least, allowed for the possibility that women could be classified into three types. In contrast, Erskine’s comment implies a narrowing of the adaptive strategies of the female of the species—in a word, devolution.

In researching Erskine, I learned that he was one of the founders of the “Great Books” movement in the U.S., largely because of his advocacy of it at my alma mater, Columbia University. Contemporary Civilization and Literary Humanities—the two courses that use the mode of Socratic teaching he championed—still represent the rock of Columbia’s curriculum, 90 years later.

But I’m afraid that if Erskine had women in his classes, they might not have taken so kindly to his comment above. "Sexist pig," they might have called him (an epithet that would certainly be hurled in my time, across Broadway from Barnard), with more than a little justice. "Get over yourself," today's confident Columbia coed might have said.

In any case, the “charming woman” for whom he yearned--the type of woman that all too many males, truth be told, want--might have done so for reasons having nothing to do with his good attributes.

The critic Dwight Macdonald got to the heart of the situation in describing one woman who would unquestionably have to be classified as “very clever,” Mary McCarthy: “'When most pretty girls smile at you, you feel terrific. When Mary smiles at you, you look to see if your fly is open.''