At fourteen Eleanor had definite opinions, was reflective, and was capable of a crisp expression of her views. An essay on “Ambition” exists only as a draft, and toward the end the corrections she made in it became somewhat illegible, but the main ideas are clear. She was ambitious. She wanted to succeed.
AMBITION
Some people consider ambition a sin but it seems to me to be a great good for it leads one to do & to be things which without it one could never have been. Look at Caesar. It was because he was ambitious that they killed him but would he ever have been as great a man had he not had ambition? Would his name ever have come down to us if he had not had enough ambition to conquer the world? Would painters ever paint wonderful portraits or writers ever write books if they did not have ambition?
Of course it is easier to have no ambition & just keep on the same way every day & never try to do grand or great things, for it is only those who have ambition & who try & who meet with difficulties, they alone feel the disappointments that come when one does not succeed in what one has meant to do for the others say “It was meant that we should not succeed. Fate has so decreed it” and do not think of it again. But those who have ambition try again, & try till they at last succeed. It is only those who ever succeed in doing anything great.
Ambition makes us selfish and careless of pushing others back & treading on them to gain our wish it is true, but we will only be able to push back the smaller souls for the great ones we cannot tread on. Those who are ambitious & make a place & a name in the great world for themselves are nearly always despised & laughed at by lesser souls who could not do as well & all they do for the good of men is construed into wrong & yet they do the good & they leave their mark upon the ages & if they had had no ambition would they ever have made a mark?
Is it best never to be known & to leave the world a blank as if one had never come? It must have been meant it seems to me that we should leave some mark upon the world & not just live [&] pass away. For what good can that do to ourselves or others? It is better to be ambitious & do something than to be unambitious & do nothing.
Ambition is essential for any kind of success. Even those best men who condemn ambition, must have it or they would never do anything good. For it is their ambition that makes them wish to do better things than other people.
Therefore it seems to me that after all people have said against it ambition is still a good thing.
While she considered ambition a virtue, wanted to achieve great things and even echoed Roser’s social Darwinism with the suggestion that only the fittest survive—and deserve to survive—these were not really the beliefs by which she lived. Highest in her scale of values were loyalty, friendship, service to others. And women, she lamented in another composition, lacked these qualities, which were so much more desirable than mere beauty. Thus did she seek to come to terms with her own lack of good looks. Her distaste for women who kissed one moment and the next tore each other’s characters to shreds was also the response of a judgmental young girl to the mercurial crushes of her schoolmates and aunts—some of whom, at least, thought her too high-minded, too serious, too good.
LOYALTY AND FRIENDSHIP
Loyalty is one of the few virtues which most women lack. That is why there are so few real friendships among women for no friendship can exist without loyalty. With a man it is a point of honor to be loyal to his friend but a woman will kiss her best friend one moment & when she is gone will sit down with another best friend & pick the other’s character to pieces.
It may seem strange but no matter how plain a woman may be if truth & loyalty are stamped upon her face all will be attracted to her & she will do good to all who come near her & those who know her will always love her for they will feel her loyal spirit & have confidence in her while another woman far more beautiful & attractive will never gain anybody’s confidence simply because those around her feel her lack of loyalty & by not having this great virtue she will lose one of the greatest gifts that God has given man, the power of friendship. . . .
She was, of course, talking about herself. She was the “plain” one, who by her truth and constancy would gain the love and confidence of those around her. She would succeed by the strength of her character since she did not have beauty to fall back upon. The first entry in a briefly kept journal is a careful copying out of a long poem, “My Kate,” by Mrs. Browning:
She was not as pretty as women I know, yet one
. . . turned from the fairest to gaze in her face.
And when you had once seen her forehead and mouth
You saw as distinctly her soul and her truth. . . .
She never found fault with you, never implied
Your wrong by her right, and yet men at her side,
Grew nobler, girls purer as through the whole town
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown.
“So like Aunt Pussie,” Eleanor wrote at the bottom of the poem. “How I wish I was like her. I don’t suppose I ever will be though.”
Actually, Pussie, who was the most volatile of the Hall sisters, was not very much like Mrs. Browning’s Kate. Pussie was constantly involved in tempestuous love affairs whose ups and downs she shared with Maude and Eleanor, much to their delight. She was also frequently depressed, and when she was she locked her door and talked to no one for days. She was an accomplished pianist, briefly tried her hand at painting, shared her literary enthusiasms with Eleanor, and even took her to meet the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse. Eleanor devotedly served her lovely aunt, rubbed her temples when she complained of headaches, and once even groped tremblingly down three flights of stairs in the dark of night to get her some ice from the backyard icebox at Thirty-seventh Street. Because Eleanor adored Pussie, she invested her with Kate’s nobility, but because Pussie was irresponsible as well as irrepressible, she was scarcely a woman, as Eleanor herself later realized, at whose side men grew nobler and girls purer.
“I have a headache journal tonight,” Eleanor wrote on November 18, 1898.
I am feeling cross. Poor Auntie Pussie she is so worried. I am going to try and see if I can’t do something for her tonight. I have studied hard two lessons but I can’t think of a composition. I suppose I can think tomorrow. Am not going to tell you—unless something happens. I’ve tried to be good and sweet and quiet but have not succeeded. Oh my.
She was setting herself very high ideals, an entry for November 13 indicated.
To be the thing we seem
To do the thing we deem enjoined by duty
To walk in faith nor dream
Of questioning God’s scheme of truth and beauty.
“It is very hard to do what this verse says,” Eleanor commented, “so hard I never succeed & I am always questioning, questioning because I cannot understand & never succeed in doing what I mean to do, never, never. I suppose I don’t really try. I can feel it in me sometimes that I can do much more [than] I am doing & I mean to try till I do succeed.”
The final entry in the journal, dated November 18, also reported that
Alice did not come. I will never see her I am afraid. I wish I could but I don’t dare ask if she is coming to lunch. I do hope I will see her. Goodnight journal.
In 1898 Alice was in open rebellion against her stepmother and had been sent to New York to stay with Auntie Bye, now married to Commander William Sheffield Cowles. Alice had grown into a defiant, hoydenish girl who coasted down steep hills with her feet on the handlebars of her bike, rode her pony hard and recklessly, and once, to get an evening out with her teen-age gang (of which she was the leader although its only girl member), had one of the boys call for her dressed in his sister’s clothes, a ruse that was discovered.8
Not surprisingly, she considered Eleanor too mild. “She was full of duty, never very gay, a frightful bore for the more frivolous people like ourselves.” Although Eleanor looked forward to Alice’s visits, they never turned out to be as happy as she had anticipated. Alice was a tease, a
nd when she and the other girls excitedly discussed the “facts of life,” Eleanor was embarrassed. Once they were all chattering away in Alice’s room at Auntie Bye’s—Eleanor, Alice, Gwen Burden, Jessie Sloane, Margaret Dix, and Helen Cutting. “No one should talk about things like that,” Eleanor indignantly protested. When they told her that everything they were saying could be found in the Bible, she lapsed into injured silence. “What is the meaning of whore?” she asked her grandmother when she returned home, adding, “It is in the Bible.” “It is not a word that little girls should use,” Mrs. Hall said severely.
Later on, her schoolfriends enlightened her.9
After her parents’ deaths Eleanor saw little of her Oyster Bay relatives. Grandmother Hall had said that she wanted the children to be “influenced by their father’s family as well as by their dear Mother’s” but frightened by the gay and strenuous life led by the Teddy Roosevelt clan, she kept Eleanor away, and Theodore’s wife did not press Eleanor to visit Oyster Bay. Aunt Edith was standoffish and reserved toward all but her immediate family, but when Eleanor did go to Sagamore Edith saw the child’s future with remarkable prescience. “Poor little soul, she is very plain,” she wrote Bamie. “Her mouth and teeth seem to have no future. But the ugly duckling may turn out to be a swan.” Whatever Aunt Edith’s attitude toward her, Uncle Ted’s affection was huge and vehement. He loved all his nieces, having what Alice called a “tribal affection,” but Eleanor was his favorite because she was Elliott’s daughter and “he was very devoted to Uncle Ellie.”
“Eleanor, my darling Eleanor,” he greeted her as he helped her out of the carriage at Sagamore and crushed her to his chest. “He was a bear,” Edith reported, and “pounced upon her with such vigor that he tore all the gathers out of Eleanor’s frock and both buttonholes out of her petticoat.” Eleanor loved the day and a half she was allowed to stay at Sagamore, but keeping up with her uncle and her cousins turned into another series of mortifying proofs that she was inadequate. Alice was much better at sports. Eleanor did not even know how to swim, she had to confess the first time she went to Oyster Bay, whereupon Uncle Ted told her to jump off the dock, which she obediently did, only to come up panicky and spluttering.10
Then he organized a race down Cooper’s Bluff, a steep sandy cliff, with each cousin holding onto the hand of another, and Uncle Ted in the lead. Rolling, tumbling, sliding down, she was “desperately afraid” the first time, but then realizing that there was little to fear, entered into the fun. Her Uncle Ted did everything with a boyish zest, chasing the children through the haystacks, into which they burrowed like rabbits, and through the barn in the game of hide and go seek. In the evening around a campfire he would pull out whatever book he had in his pocket and read to them; on rainy days he took them to the gun room and read to them there. A week end in Sagamore was a test of self-control and perseverance, of hiding fears and doing things to the best of her ability, but when Eleanor returned to her lonely existence at Tivoli or Thirty-seventh Street she was again the outsider.
The only other occasion on which she saw her father’s family was at the Christmas party that Auntie Corinne gave at Orange. That was the only time she was with boys her own age, and the experience gave her “more pain than pleasure.” The other young people knew each other so much better, she was poor at winter sports, and she thought that she danced awkwardly and was not dressed properly.
“Mother would have Eleanor stay with us,” her cousin Corinne recalled.
We were a gay ebullient family. Eleanor was just sad. For the big party she was dressed by her grandmother in a short, white nainsook with little blue bows on either shoulder, the hem above her knees all hanging like a child’s party dress but she was 14. She was in Alice’s age group and Alice had on a sophisticated long dress. We begged her to borrow a dress, but she was noble, martyred and refused.
“We all felt the same way about her—Mother, Auntie Bye and I,” Corinne added. “We loved her. We admired her and we were sad about her.”11
But finally, when Eleanor was just turning fifteen, Grandmother Hall decided it was not good for her to remain at home. Her son Vallie was becoming increasingly difficult to handle, and Pussie had turned out to be a sophisticated but wildly romantic woman who had young men to tea and smoked cigarettes.
“Your mother wanted you to go to boarding school in Europe,” Mrs. Hall told Eleanor. “And I have decided to send you, child.”
Finishing school in Europe meant Allenswood and Mlle. Souvestre, who had done such wonders in 1869 for Auntie Bye and whom Eleanor’s parents had met and liked in 1891 when they were living in the suburbs of Paris.
Another stage of her life was beginning. The years of being an outsider were over.
* Several readers have noted that Eleanor’s The Tempest is a prose version of a widely reprinted poem by James T. Fields, sometimes entitled “The Captain’s Daughters.”
† She was often asked in later years to list her favorite girlhood books. “I loved Dickens’ Old Curiosity Shop and Tale of Two Cities; Longfellow’s Poems; Kipling’s Light That Failed; Walter Scott’s The Talisman; Sarah Carew; The Prince and the Pauper; The Little Lame Prince; Ouida’s Dog of Flanders and Nuremberg Stove.” On another occasion she added Oliver Twist and Dombey and Son as among the books she remembered from girlhood and “with great enthusiasm a long book called Thaddeus of Warsaw, which was a historical novel, touching on one phase of Poland’s efforts to remain a free nation.” In an article for Girl Scout Magazine, August, 1933, she said that she had read George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Romola, and Silas Marner as she “grew a little older.” Also, a “book which could not be found today in any library—The Gad Fly—gave me hours of pleasure.”
‡ The Sunday at Home: Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading (Religious Tract Society, London).
8.THE SPARK IS STRUCK
A YEAR AFTER ELEANOR ARRIVED AT ALLENSWOOD, ON THE outskirts of London near Wimbledon Common, its remarkable headmistress, Mlle. Souvestre, wrote Mrs. Hall:
All what you said when she came here of the purity her heart, the nobleness of her thought has been verified by her conduct among people who were at first perfect strangers to her. I have not found her easily influenced in anything that was not perfectly straightforward and honest but I often found she influenced others in the right direction. She is full of sympathy for all those who live with her and shows an intelligent interest in everything she comes in contact with.1
Eleanor blossomed in the warm, friendly environment of Allenswood—it was as if she had started life anew. Behind her were the people who pitied her because she was an orphan or who taunted her for her virtues, and for the first time in her life all fear left her and her personality began to shine forth. “As a pupil she is very satisfactory,” Mlle. Souvestre’s evaluation continued, “but even that is of small account when you compare it with the perfect quality of her soul.”
Bamie had been sent to Mlle. Souvestre in 1869 when the latter was headmistress of Les Ruches in Fontainebleau, outside of Paris. Because of an internal crisis precipitated by her co-principal, Marie Souvestre had given up Les Ruches, and years of “cruel sadness” had followed. In the mid-eighties she founded her new school in England.*
“The elite of many countries” sent their daughters to Allenswood—the Chamberlains, the Roosevelts, the Siemenses, the Stracheys. Henry James thought well enough of the school to suggest that his brother William send his daughter there in 1899, and described the sixty-five-year-old Mlle. Souvestre as “a most distinguished and admirable woman” who
has had for many years a very highly esteemed school for girls at high, breezy Wimbledon, near London (an admirable situation)—where she has formed the daughters of many of the very good English advanced Liberal political and professional connection during these latter times. She is a very fine, interesting person, her school holds a very particular place (all Joe Chamberlain’s daughters were there and they adore her,) and I must tell you more of her.
“The one shade of objection,” he wrote Mrs. William James a few days later, “is that it is definitely ‘middle-class’. But all schools here are that.” By “middle-class” James meant to differentiate between the upper bourgeoisie and the intellectual elite to which he, as a man of genius, belonged.2
While the majority of the 35 to 40 girls enrolled in the school when Eleanor arrived were English-speaking, French was obligatory inside the classroom and out. This was no hardship for Eleanor, and, indeed, in the first few bewildering days she was reassured to see the other new girls having difficulty with the language. At her “first meal,” a classmate recalled, “when we hardly dared open our mouths, she sat opposite Mlle. Souvestre chatting away in French . . . we admired her courage.”3
The American newcomer was turned over to Marjorie Bennett, an English girl who was to be Eleanor’s roommate. “Bennett” showed her around the school and explained its rules. Allenswood had some of the austerity and strictness of a British public school. “Its strict discipline suited the temperament of the youthful ‘Totty.’”4 The girls wore long skirts, usually black, white ruffled blouses, and boaters out-of-doors. Their day was fully programmed, and punctuality was mandatory. They made their own beds. Bureau drawers and closets had to be arranged as laid down in the rules and ready for inspection at any moment. At meals everything taken onto a plate had to be eaten. After breakfast there was a brisk walk in the commons in good weather and foul, and in London’s damp chill Eleanor gladly began wearing her flannels again.
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