Kitabı oku: «The Art of Living», sayfa 11
If the summer-time is the time in which to recuperate and lie fallow, why should we have so many summer schools? After the grand panjandrum of Commencement exercises at the colleges is over, there ought to be a pause in the intellectual activity of the nation for at least sixty days; yet there seems to be a considerable body of men and women who, in spite of the fact that they exercise their brains vigorously during the rest of the year, insist on mental gymnastics when the thermometer is in the eighties. These schools – chiefly assemblies in the name of the ologies and osophies – bring together more or less people more or less learned, from all over the country, to talk at one another and read papers.
Judging merely from the newspaper accounts of their proceedings, it is almost invariably impossible to discover the exact meaning of anything which is uttered, but this may be due to the absence of the regular reporters on their annual vacations, and the consequent delegation to tyros of the difficult duty in question. But even assuming that the utterances of the summer schools are both intelligible and stimulating, would not the serious-minded men and women concerned in them be better off lying in a hammock under a wide-spreading beech-tree, or, if this seems too relaxing an occupation, watching the bathers at Narragansett Pier? There is wisdom sometimes in sending young and very active boys to school for about an hour a day in summer, in order chiefly to know where they are and to prevent them from running their legs off; but with this exception the mental workers in this country, male and female, young and old, can afford to close their text-books with a bang on July 1st, and not peep at them again until September. Philosophy in August has much the flavor of asparagus in January.
The Case of Man
I
A not inconsiderable portion of the women of the United States is inclined to regard man as a necessary evil. Their point of view is that he is here, and therefore is likely, for the present at least, to remain a formidable figure in human affairs, but that his ways are not their ways, that they disapprove of them and him, and that they intend to work out their lives and salvation as independently of him as possible. What man in the flush and prime of life has not been made conscious of this attitude of the modern woman? She is constantly passing us in the street with the manner of one haughtily and supremely indifferent. There are women enough still who look patterns of modesty, and yet let us feel at the same time that we are more or less an object of interest to them; but this particular type sails by in her trig and often stylish costume with the air not merely of not seeing us, but of wishing to ignore us. Her compressed lips suggest a judgment; a judgment born of meditated conviction which leaves no hope of reconsideration or exception. “You are all substantially alike,” she seems to say, “and we have had enough of you. Go your ways and we will go ours.”
The Mecca of the modern woman’s hopes, as indicated by this point of view, would appear to be the ultimate disappearance of man from the face of the earth after the manner of the mastodon and other brutes. Nor are her hopes balked by physiological barriers. She is prepared to admit that it is not obvious, as yet, how girls alone are to be generated and boy babies given the cold maternal shoulder; but she trusts to science and the long results of time for a victory which will eliminate sexual relations and all their attendant perplexities and tragedies from the theatre of human life.
We are not so sanguine as she that the kingdom of heaven is to be brought to pass in any so simple and purely feminine a fashion. That is, we men. Perhaps we are fatuous, but we see no reason to doubt that sexual relations will continue to the crack of doom, in spite of the perplexities and tragedies consequent upon them; and moreover, that man will continue to thrive like a young bay-tree, even though she continues to wear a chip on her tailor-made shoulder. And yet at the same time we feel sober. It is not pleasant to be regarded as brutes and to have judgment passed upon us by otherwise attractive women. It behooves us to scratch our heads and ask ourselves if we can possibly merit the haughty indifference and thinly disguised contempt which is entertained toward us. To be weighed in the balance and found wanting by a serene and beautiful young person is a far from agreeable experience. There must be something wrong with us, and if so, what is it?
Of course there was a time – and not so very long ago – when men were tyrants and kept women under. Nowadays the only thing denied them in polite circles is to whisk around by themselves after dark, and plenty of them do that. The law is giving them, with both hands, almost everything they ask for nearly as rapidly as existing inequalities are pointed out, and the right of suffrage is withheld from them only because the majority of women are still averse to exercising it. Man, the tyrant and highwayman, has thrown up his arms and is allowing woman to pick his pockets. He is not willing to have her bore a hole in his upper lip, and drag him behind her with a rope, but he is disposed to consent to any reasonable legislative changes which she desires to have made, short of those which would involve masculine disfigurement or depreciation. It certainly cannot be his bullying qualities which have attracted her disdain, for he has given in. If woman to-day finds that the law discriminates unjustly between her and man, she has merely to ask for relief in sufficient numbers to show that she is not the tool of designing members of her own sex, in order to obtain it.
Under the spur of these reflections I consulted my wife by way of obtaining light on this problem. “Barbara, why is it that modern women of a certain type are so sniffy toward men? You know what I mean; they speak to us, of course, and tolerate us, and they love us individually as husbands and fathers; but instead of counting for everything, as we once did, we don’t seem to count for anything unless it be dollars and cents. It isn’t merely that you all talk so fast and have so much to say without regard to us that we often feel left out in the cold, and even hurt, but there is a stern, relentless look on some of your faces which makes us feel as though we had stolen the Holy Grail. You must have noticed it.”
“Oh, yes,” said Barbara, with a smile. “It doesn’t mean very much. Of course times are not what they were. Man used to be a demigod, now he is only a – ”
Barbara hesitated for a word, so I suggested, “Only a bank.”
“Let us say only a man. Only a man in the eyes of reflective womanhood. We have caught up and are beginning to think for ourselves. You can’t expect us to hang on your every word and to fall down and worship you without reservation as we once did. Man used to be woman’s whole existence, often to her infinite sorrow, and now he is only part of it, just as she is only a part of his. You go to your clubs; we go to ours; and while you are playing cards we read or listen to papers, some of which are not intelligible to man. But we love you still, even though we have ceased to worship you. There are a few, I admit, who would like to do away with you altogether; but they are extremists – in every revolution, you know, there are fanatics and unreasonable persons – but the vast majority of us have a tender spot for you in our hearts, and regard your case in sorrow rather than in anger – and as probably not hopeless.”
“What is the matter with us?”
“Oh, everything. You are a failure fundamentally. To begin with, your theory of life is founded on compromise. We women – the modern woman – abhor compromise.”
Although it was obvious that Barbara was trying to tease me, I realized from her expression that she intended to deal my sex a crucial stab by the word compromise. I must confess that I felt just a little uncomfortable under the white light of scorn which radiated from her eyes, while her general air reminded me for the first time disagreeably of the type of modern woman to whom I had referred.
“The world progresses by compromise,” I replied, sententiously.
“Yes, like a snail.”
“Otherwise it would stand still. A man thinks so and so; another man thinks precisely opposite; they meet each other half-way and so much is gained.”
“Oh, I know how they do. A man who stands for a principle meets another man; they argue and bluster for a few minutes, and presently they sit down and have something to eat or drink, and by the time they separate the man who stands for a principle has sacrificed all there is of it, except a tiny scrap or shred, in order not to incommode the man who has no principles at all; and what is almost worse, they part seemingly bosom friends and are apt to exchange rhetorical protestations of mutual esteem. The modern woman has no patience with such a way of doing things.”
“I suppose,” said I, “that two modern women under similar circumstances would tear each other all to pieces; there would be nothing to eat or drink, except possibly tea and wafers, and the floor would be covered with fragments of skin, hair, and clothing. When they separated one would be dead and the other maimed for life, and the principle for which the victor stood would be set back about a century and a half.”
Barbara winced a little, but she said, “What have you men accomplished all these years by your everlasting compromises? If you were really in earnest to solve the liquor problem, and the social evil, as you call it, and all the other abuses which exist in civilized and uncivilized society, you would certainly have been able to do more than you have. You have had free scope; we haven’t been consulted; we have stood aside and let you have your innings; now we merely wish to see what we can do. We shall make mistakes I dare say; even one or two of us may be torn to pieces or maimed for life; but the modern woman feels that she has the courage of her convictions and that she does not intend to let herself be thwarted or cajoled by masculine theories. That accounts largely for our apparent sniffiness. I say ‘apparent,’ because we are not really at bottom so contemptuous as we seem – even the worst of us. I suppose you are right in declaring that the proud, superior, and beautiful young person of the present day is a little disdainful. But even she is less severe than she looks. She is simply a nineteenth-century Joan of Arc protesting against the man of the world and his works, asking to be allowed to lead her life without molestation from him in a shrine of her own tasteful yet simple construction – rooms or a room where she can practise her calling, follow her tastes, ambitions, or hobbies, pursue her charities, and amuse herself without being accountable to him. She wishes him to understand that, though she is attractive, she does not mean to be seduced or to be worried into matrimony against her will, and that she intends to use her earnings and her property to pay her own bills and provide for her own gratification, instead of to defray the debts of her vicious or easy-going male relations or admirers. There is really a long back account to settle, so it is not surprising that the pendulum should swing a little too far the other way. Of course she is wrong; woman can no more live wholly independent of man than he of her – and you know what a helpless being he would be without her – and the modern woman is bound to recognize, sooner or later, that the sympathetic companionship of women with men is the only basis of true social progress. Sexual affinity is stronger than the constitutions of all the women’s clubs combined, as eight out of ten young modern women discover to their cost, or rather to their happiness, sooner or later. Some brute of a man breaks into the shrine, and before she knows it she is wheeling a baby carriage. Even the novelist, with his or her fertile invention, has failed to discover any really satisfactory ending for the independent, disdainful heroine but marriage or the grave. Spinsterhood, even when illumined by a career, is a worthy and respectable lot, but not alluring.”
It was something to be assured by my wife that the modern woman does not purpose to abolish either maternity or men, and that, so to speak, her bark is worse than her bite. Barbara belongs to a woman’s club, so she must know. We men are in such a nervous state, as a result of what Barbara calls the revolution, that very likely we are unduly sensitive and suspicious, and allow our imaginations to fly off at a tangent. Very likely, too, we are disposed to be a trifle irritable, for when one has been accustomed for long to sit on or club a person (literally or metaphorically, according to one’s social status) when she happens to express sentiments or opinions contrary to ours, it must needs take time to get used to the idea that she is really an equal, and to adjust one’s ratiocinations to suit. But even accepting as true the assurance that the forbidding air of the modern woman does not mean much, and that she loves us still though she has ceased to worship us, we have Barbara’s word for it, too, that the modern woman thinks we have made a mess of it and that man is a failure fundamentally. Love without respect! Sorrow rather than anger! It sobers one; it saddens one. For we must admit that man has had free scope and a long period in which to make the most of himself; and woman has not, which precludes us from answering back, as it were, which is always more or less of a consolation when one is brought to bay.
A tendency to compromise is certainly one of man’s characteristics. Barbara has referred to it as a salient fault – a vice, and perhaps it is, though it is writ large in the annals of civilization as conducted by man. We must at least agree that it is not woman’s way, and that she expects to do without it when we are no more or are less than we are now. Probably we have been and are too easy-going, and no one will deny that one ought at all times to have the courage of one’s convictions, even in midsummer and on purely social occasions; nevertheless it would have been trying to the nervous system and conducive to the continuance and increase of standing armies, had we favored the policy of shooting at sight those whose views on the temperance question differed from ours, or of telling the host at whose house we had passed the evening that we had been bored to death.
If one runs over in his mind the Madame Tussaud Gallery of masculine types, he cannot fail to acknowledge that, in our capacity of lords of creation and viceregents of Providence, we have produced and perpetuated a number of sorry specimens. First in the list stands the so-called man of the world, on account of whom in particular, according to Barbara, the nineteenth-century Joan of Arc looks askance at our sex. He is an old stager; he dates back very nearly, if not completely, to the garden of Eden, and he has always been a bugbear to woman. It is not necessary to describe him; he has ever stood for simply carnal interests and appetites, whether as a satyr, a voluptuary, a wine-bibber, a glutton, a miser, an idler, or a mere pleasure-seeker. If all the human industries which have owed and still owe their prosperity to his propensities were to be obliterated, there would be a large array of unemployed in the morning but a healthier world. The bully, or prevailer by brute force, the snob, the cynic, the parasite, the trimmer, and the conceited egotist are others prominent in the category, without regard to criminals and unvarnished offenders against whose noxious behavior men have protected themselves by positive law.
On the other hand, our gallery of past types has many figures of which we have a right to be proud. Unfortunately we are barred again from comparison or answering back by the taunt that woman has never had a chance; nevertheless we may claim for what it is worth that, in the realm of intellect or of the spirit, there have been no women who have soared so high; seers, poets, law-givers, unfolders of nature’s secrets, administrators of affairs, healers and scholars have been chiefly or solely men. If some of us have fraternized with Belial, others have walked, or sought to walk, with God no less genuinely and fervently than any woman who ever breathed. In the matter of spirituality, indeed, some of us in the past having been led to believe that women knew more about the affairs of the other world than men, sought to cultivate the spindle-legged, thin-chested, pale, anæmic Christian as the type of humanity most acceptable to God and serviceable to society; but we have gone back to the bishop of sturdy frame and a reasonably healthy appetite as a more desirable mediator between ourselves and heaven.
From the standpoint of our present inquiry, what man in his various types has been in the past is less pertinent than what he is at present. To begin with, certainly the modern man is not a picturesque figure. He no longer appeals to the feminine or any eye by virtue of imposing apparel or accoutrements. Foreign army officers and servants in livery are almost the only males who have not exchanged plumage for sober woollens, tweeds, or serges, and the varied resplendent materials and colors by means of which men used to distinguish themselves from one another and to negative their evil-doings in the eyes of women have been discarded. All men but one look alike to any woman, and even that one is liable to be confounded with the rest of mankind when he is more than half a block away.
Nor is the homogeneous tendency limited to clothes; it includes manners, morals, and point of view. The extreme types approximate each other much more closely than formerly, and apart from criminals and deliberately evil-minded persons, women have some ground for their insinuation that we are all pretty much alike. Let it be said that this effect is in one sense a feather in our caps. The nineteenth-century Joan of Arc to the contrary notwithstanding, the modern man of the world is a manifest improvement on his predecessor. He is no longer to be found under the table after dinner as a social matter of course, and three-bottles-to-a-guest festivities have ceased to be an aristocratic function. Though on occasions still he will fumble with the latch-key, he mounts the stairs very little, if at all, after midnight with the nonchalance of self-congratulatory sobriety, and all those dire scenes of woman on the staircase with a lighted candle looking down at her prostrate lord and master belong to an almost dim past. True it may be that the man of the world fears God no more than formerly, but he has learned to have a wholesome dread of Bright’s disease, the insane asylum, and those varied forms of sudden and premature death which are included under the reportorial head of heart-failure. Mere brutishness in its various forms is less apparent. The coarse materialist still swaggers in public places and impudently puffs a cigar in the face of modesty, but he serves no longer as a model for envious contemporaries or an object of hero-worship to the rising generation. Good taste, if nothing better, has checked man’s tendencies to make a beast of himself in public or in private.
Similarly, also, the type of man to whom we look up most proudly and confidently to-day is not altogether the same. The model whom we were urged, and whom we sought of old to imitate, was he who wrestled with God on the mountain-top, without a thought of earth’s smoke and din and wretchedness. Human life and its joys and interests served for him as a homily on vanity, or was regarded as a degradation in comparison with the revelations obtained by the priest, poet, or devotee of culture through the vista of aspiring imagination or zeal. The conservative man of affairs – vigorous, far-seeing, keenly alive to the joys and interests of this life, strongly sympathetic on the humanitarian side, a man of the world withal in a reasonable sense – has impressed his personality on modern society more successfully than any other type. The priest who cares not for his fellow-man, the poet whose dreams and visions include no human interest or passion, the devotee of culture who refines merely to refine, have been superseded, and in their stead we have the man of the world who is interested in the world and for the world.
This change in the avowed aims and aspirations of man has not been without certain apparently melancholy results and manifestations of which society is feeling the effect at present, and which if allowed to prevail too far will undo us. The removal of the gaze of the priest, poet, and devotee of culture from the stars in contempt of earth, and the substitution of earth-gazing as a method for understanding the stars, has seemed to cast a damper on human imagination and has thereby caused many excellent women and some men to weep. If materialism be the science of trying to get the most out of this life, this is a material age; but at the same time it should be remembered that man in this age has ceased for the first time to be either a hypocrite or a fool. Undoubtedly the process of becoming both sincere and sensible, especially as it has substituted concern for the ignorant, the oppressed, and the vicious of this earth about whom we know next to nothing, in place of Pre-Raphaelite heavenly choirs, alabaster halls, and saints in glory about whom we thought we knew everything, has been a little trying for the rest of us as well as for the priests, poets, and devotees of culture. But the women must not be discouraged; we shall grow to the situation in time, and even the poets, who seem to be most down in the mouth at present, will sooner or later find a fresh well of inspiration by learning to study the reflection of the stars on the earth instead of looking directly at them. Let them be patient, though it be to death, and some day through others, if not through themselves, the immortal verse will flow and the immortal lyre sound again.
Undoubtedly the modern man is at present a rather trying person to woman, for woman would have been glad, now that she is coming into her kingdom, to have him more of a crusader and less of a philosopher. To behold him lacking in picturesqueness and a philosopher addicted to compromise into the bargain is almost irritating to her, and she has certainly some ground for criticism. The man who sits opposite to her at the breakfast-table, even after he has overcome conservative fears of nothing to live on and dawdled into matrimony, is a lovable but not especially exciting person. He eats, works, and sleeps, does most of the things which he ought to do and leaves undone a commendable number of the things which he ought not to do, and is a rather respectable member of society of the machine-made order. He works very hard to supply her with money; he is kind to her and the children; he gives her her head, as he calls it; and he acquiesces pleasantly enough in the social plans which she entertains for herself and him, and ordinarily he is sleepy in the evening. Indeed, in moments of most serious depression she is tempted to think of him as a superior chore-man, a comparison which haunts her even in church. She would like, with one fell swoop of her broom, to clear the world of the social evil, the fruit of the grape, tobacco, and playing cards, to introduce drastic educational reforms which would, by kindergarten methods, familiarize every one on earth with art and culture, and to bring to pass within five, or possibly six years, a golden age of absolute reform inspired and established by woman. Life for her at present means one vast camp of committee meetings, varied only by frequent cups of tea; and that steaming beverage continues prominent in her radiant vision of the coming millennium. No wonder it disconcerts and annoys her to find so comparatively little enthusiastic confidence in the immediate success of her fell swoop, and to have her pathway blocked by grave or lazy ifs and buts and by cold contradictions of fact. No wonder she abhors compromise; no wonder she regards the man who goes on using tobacco and playing cards and drinking things stronger than tea as an inert and soulless creature.
Yet smile as we may at the dull, sorry place the world would be were the golden age of her intention to come upon us over night like a cold wave, is she not justified in regarding the average custom-made man of the day as a highly respectable, well-to-do chore-man who earns fair wages and goes to sleep at night contented with a good meal and a pipe? Is he not machine-made? Sincere and wise as he is, now that his gaze is fixed on the needs of earth, has he not the philosophy of hygienic comfort and easy-going conservative materialism so completely on the brain that he is in danger of becoming ordinary instead of just a little lower than the angels? Let us consider him from this point of view more in detail.
