Kitabı oku: «The Art of Living», sayfa 12

II

The young man of the present era on his twenty-first birthday is apt to find himself in a very prudent and conservative atmosphere. The difficulties of getting on are explained to him; he is properly assured that, though there is plenty of room on the top benches, the occupations and professions are crowded, if not overcrowded, and that he must buckle down if he would succeed. It is obvious to him that the field of adventure and fortune-seeking in foreign or strange places is practically exhausted. It is open to him, to be sure, to go to the North Pole in search of some one already there, or to study in a cage in the jungles of Africa the linguistic value of the howls and chatterings of wild animals; but these are manifestly poor pickings compared with the opportunities of the past when a considerable portion of the globe was still uninvestigated soil, and a reputation or treasure-trove was the tolerably frequent reward of leaving the rut of civilized life. It is plainly pointed out to him, too, that to be florid is regarded as almost a mental weakness in intellectual or progressive circles. He sees the lawyer who makes use of metaphor, bombast, and the other arts of oratory, which used to captivate and convince, distanced in the race for eminence by him who employs a succinct, dispassionate, and almost colloquial form of statement. He recognizes that in every department of human activity, from the investigation of disease-germs to the management of railroads, steady, undemonstrative marshallings of fact, and cautious, unemotional deduction therefrom are considered the scientific and only appropriate method. He knows that the expression of unusual or erratic ideas will expose him to the stigma of being a crank, a reputation which, once acquired, sticks like pitch, and that the betrayal of sentiment will induce conservative people to put him on the suspected list.

All this is imbibed by him as it should be, in the interest of sincerity and sense. Under the sobering restraint of it the young man begins to make his way with enthusiasm and energy, but circumspectly and deliberately. He mistrusts everything that he cannot pick to pieces on the spot and analyze, and though he is willing to be amused, beguiled, or even temporarily inspired by appeals to his imagination or emotions, he puts his doubts or qualms aside next morning at the behest of business. He wishes to get on. He is determined not to allow anything to interfere with that, and he understands that that is to be accomplished partly by hard work and partly by becoming a good fellow and showing common-sense. This is excellent reasoning until one examines too closely what is expected of him as a good fellow, and what is required of him in the name of common-sense.

There have been good fellows in every age, and some of them have been tough specimens. Our good fellow is almost highly respectable. He wishes to live as long as he can, and to let others live as long as they can. His patron saints are his doctor, his bank account, prudence, and general toleration. If he were obliged to specify the vice not covered by the statute law which he most abhors, he would probably name slopping over. He aims to be genial, sympathetic, and knowing, but not obtrusively so, and he is becomingly suspicious and reticent regarding everything which cannot be demonstrated on a chart like an international yacht-race or a medical operation. He is quietly and moderately licentious, and justifies himself satisfactorily but mournfully on hygienic grounds or on the plea of masculine inevitability. He works hard, if he has to, for he wishes to live comfortably by the time he is forty, and comfort means, as it ought to mean, an attractive wife, an attractive establishment, and an attractive income. An imprudent marriage seems to him one of the most egregious forms of slopping over. If he hears that two of his contemporaries are engaged, his first inquiry is, “What have they to live on?” and if the answer is unsatisfactory, they fall a peg or two in his estimation, and he is likely, the next time he feels mellow after dinner, to descant on the impropriety of bringing children into the world who may be left penniless orphans. If he falls in love himself before he feels that his pecuniary position warrants it, he tries to shake out the arrow, and, if that fails, he cuts it out deliberately under antiseptic treatment to avoid blood-poisoning. All our large cities are full of young men who have undergone this operation. To lose one’s vermiform appendix is a perilous yet blessed experience; but this trifling with the human heart, however scientific the excision, can scarcely be regarded as beneficial unless we are to assume that it, like the fashionable sac, has become rudimentary.

We see a great many allusions in our comic and satiric weeklies to marrying for money, but the good fellow of the best type ordinarily disdains such a proceeding. His self-respect is not offended but hugely gratified if the young woman with whom he intends to ally himself would be able immediately or prospectively to contribute a million or so to the domestic purse; but he would regard a deliberate sale of himself for cash as a dirty piece of business. On the other hand, he is very business-like where his heart is engaged, and is careful not to let his emotions or fancy get the better of him until he can see his ship – and a well-freighted one at that – on the near horizon. And what is to become of the young woman in the meantime? To let concealment, like a worm in the bud, feed on a damask cheek may be more fatal than masculine arrow extraction; for woman, less scientific in her methods than man, is less able to avoid blood-poisoning. She doses herself, probably, with anti-pyrine, burns her Emerson and her Tennyson, and after a period of nervous prostration devotes herself to charity toward the world at large with the exception of all good fellows.

The good fellow after he marries continues to be a good fellow. He adapts himself to the humanitarian necessities of the situation; he becomes fond and domestic, almost oppressively so, and he is eager to indulge the slightest wish or fancy of his mate, provided it be within the bounds of easy-going rationalism. The conjugal pliability of the American husband is a well-recognized original feature of our institutions, nevertheless he is apt to develop kinks unless he be allowed to be indulgent and companionable in his own way. He works harder than ever, and she for whose sake he is ostensibly toiling is encouraged to make herself fetching and him comfortable as progressively as his income will permit. When the toil of the week is over he looks for his reward in the form of a Welsh-rarebit with theatrical celebrities, a little game of poker within his means, or, if he be musical, a small gathering of friends to sing or play, if possible in a so-called Bohemian spirit. It irks him to stand very upright or to converse for long, whether in masculine or feminine society. He likes to sprawl and to be entertained with the latest bit of humor, but he is willing, on a pleasant Sunday or holiday, to take exercise in order to perspire freely, and then to lie at ease under a tree or a bank, pleasantly refreshed with beer and tobacco, and at peace with the world. He prefers to have her with him everywhere, except at the little game of poker, and is conscious of an aching void if she be not at hand to help him recuperate, philosophize, and admire the view. But he expects her to do what he likes, and expects her to like it too.

In no age of the world has the reasoning power of man been in better working order than at present. With all due respect to the statistics which show that the female is beginning to outstrip the male in academic competitive examinations, one has only to keep his ears and eyes open in the workaday world in order to be convinced that man’s purely mental processes suggest a razor and woman’s a corkscrew. The manager of corporate interests, the lawyer, the historian, the physician, the chemist, and the banker seek to-day to probe to the bottom that which they touch, and to expose to the acid of truth every rosy theory and seductive prospectus. This is in the line of progress; but to be satisfied with this alone would speedily reduce human society to the status of a highly organized racing stable. If man is to be merely a jockey, who is to ride as light as he can, there is nothing to be said; but even on that theory is it not possible to train too fine? With eloquence tabooed as savoring of insincerity, with conversation as a fine art starved to death, with melody in music sniffed at as sensational, and fancy in literature condemned as unscientific, with the loosening of all the bonds of conventionality which held civilization to the mark in matters of taste and elegance, and with a general doing away with color and emotion in all the practical affairs of life out of regard to the gospel of common-sense and machine-made utility, the jockey now is riding practically in his own skin.

One has to go back but a little way in order to encounter among the moving spirits of society a radically different attitude. Unquestionably the temper of the present day is the result of a vigorous reaction against false or maudlin sentiment, florid drivel, and hypocritical posturing; but certainly a Welsh-rarebit at midnight, with easy-going companions, is a far remove as a spiritual stimulus from bread eaten in tears at the same hour. As has been intimated, this exaggeration of commonplaceness will probably right itself in time, but man’s lack of susceptibility to influences and impressions which cannot be weighed, fingered, smelt, looked at, or tasted, seems to justify at present the strictures of the modern woman, who, with all her bumptiousness, would fain continue to reverence him. Some in the van of feminine progress would be glad to see the inspiration and direction of all matters – spiritual, artistic, and social – apportioned to woman as her sole rightful prerogative, and consequently to see man become veritably a superior chore-man. Fortunately the world of men and women is likely to agree with Barbara that mutual sympathy and co-operation in these matters between the sexes are indispensable to the healthy development of human society.

But even assuming that women were ready to accept the responsibility and men were willing to renounce it, I, for one, fear that civilization would find itself in a ditch rather speedily. All of us – we men, I mean – recognize the purifying and deterrent influence of woman as a Mentor and sweet critic at our elbows. We have learned to depend upon her to prod us when we lag, and to save us from ourselves when our brains get the better of our hearts. But, after all, woman is a clinging creature. She has been used to playing second fiddle; and it is quite a different affair to lead an orchestra. To point the way to spiritual or artistic progress needs, first of all, a clear intellect and a firm purpose, even though they alone are not sufficient. Woman is essentially yielding and impressionable. At the very moment when the modern Joan of Arc would be doing her best to make the world a better place, would not eleven other women out of the dozen be giving way to the captivating plausibility of some emotional situation?

As an instance of what she is already capable of from a social point of view, now that she has been given her head, may well be cited the feverish eagerness with which some of the most highly cultivated and most subtly evolved American women of our large cities vie with each other for intimacy with artistic foreign lions of their own sex known to be unchaste. They seem to regard it as a privilege to play hostess to, or, at least, to be on familiar terms with, actresses, opera-singers, and other public characters quietly but notoriously erotic, the plea in each case being that they are ready to forgive, to forget, and ignore for the sake of art and the artist. Yes, ignore or forget, if you choose, so far as seeing the artist act or hearing her sing in public is concerned, where there are no social ceremonies or intercourse; but let us please remember at the same time that even those effete nations who believe that the world would be a dull place without courtesans, insist on excluding such persons from their drawing-rooms. Indeed there is reason to believe that some of the artists in question have become hilarious, when out of sight of our hospitable shores, over the wonders of American social usages among the pure and cultivated women. Before our young men will cease to sow wild oats their female relations must cease to run after other men’s mistresses. Decidedly, the modern Joan of Arc to the contrary notwithstanding, man cannot afford to abdicate just yet. But he needs to mend his hedges and to look after his preserves.

The Case of Woman

I

A great many men, who are sane and reasonable in other matters, allow themselves, on the slightest provocation, to be worked up into a fever over the aspirations of woman. They decline to listen to argument, grow red in the face, and saw the air with their hands, if they do not pound on the table, to express their views on the subject – which, by the way, are as out of date and old-fashioned as a pine-tree shilling. They remind one of the ostrich in that they seem to imagine, because they have buried their heads in the sand, nothing has happened or is happening around them. They confront the problem of woman’s emancipation as though it were only just being broached instead of in the throes of delivery.

For instance, my friend, Mr. Julius Cæsar, who though a conservative, cautious man by nature, is agreeably and commendably liberal in other matters, seems to be able to see only one side of this question. And one side seems to be all he wishes to see. “Take my wife,” he said to me the other day; “as women go she is a very clever and sensible woman. She was given the best advantages in the way of school-training open to young ladies of her day; she has accomplishments, domestic virtues, and fine religious instincts, and I adore her. But what does she know of politics? She couldn’t tell you the difference between a senator and an alderman, and her mind is practically a blank on the tariff or the silver question. I tell you, my dear fellow, that if woman is allowed to leave the domestic hearth and play ducks and drakes with the right of suffrage, every political caucus will become a retail drygoods store. If there is one thing which makes a philosopher despair of the future of the race, it is to stand in a crowded drygoods store and watch the jam of women perk and push and sidle and grab and covet and go well-nigh crazy over things to wear. The average woman knows about clothes, the next world, children, and her domestic duties. Let her stick to her sphere. A woman at a caucus? Who would see that my dinner was properly cooked, eh?”

One would suppose from these remarks that the male American citizen spends his days chiefly at caucuses; whereas, as we all know when we reflect, he goes perhaps twice a year, if he be a punctilious patriot like Julius Cæsar, and if not, probably does not go at all. If the consciousness that his wife could vote at a caucus would act as a spur to the masculine political conscience, the male American citizen could well afford to dine at a restaurant on election-days, or to cook his own food now and then.

Of course, even a man with views like Julius Cæsar would be sorry to have his wife the slavish, dollish, or unenlightened individual which she was apt to be before so-called women’s rights were heard of. As he himself has proclaimed, he adores his wife, and he is, moreover, secretly proud of her æsthetic presentability. Without being an advanced woman, Dolly Cæsar has the interests of the day and hour at her fingers’ ends, can talk intelligently on any subject, whether she knows anything about it or not, and is decidedly in the van, though she is not a leader. Julius does not take into account, when he anathematizes the sex because of its ambitions, the difference between her and her great-grandmother. He believes his wife to be a very charming specimen of what a woman ought to be, and that, barring a few differences of costume and hair arrangement, she is practically her great-grandmother over again. Fatuous Julius! There is where he is desperately in error. Dolly Cæsar’s great-grandmother may have been a radiant beauty and a famous housekeeper, but her brain never harbored one-tenth of the ideas and opinions which make her descendant so attractive.

Those who argue on this matter like Julius Cæsar fail to take into account the gradual, silent results of time; and this is true of the results to come as well as those which have accrued. When the suffrage question is mooted one often hears sober men, more dispassionate men than Julius – Perkins, for instance, the thin, nervous lawyer and father of four girls, and a sober man indeed – ask judicially whether it is possible for female suffrage to be a success when not one woman in a thousand would know what was expected of her, or how to vote. “I tell you,” says Perkins, “they are utterly unfitted for it by training and education. Four-fifths of them wouldn’t vote if they were allowed to, and every one knows that ninety-nine women out of every hundred are profoundly ignorant of the matters in regard to which they would cast their ballots. Take my daughters; fine girls, talented, intelligent women – one of them a student of history; but what do they know of parties, and platforms, and political issues in general?”

Perkins is less violently prejudiced than Julius Cæsar. He neither saws the air nor pounds on the table. Indeed, I have no doubt he believes that he entertains liberal, unbiassed views on the subject. I wonder, then, why it never occurs to him that everything which is new is adopted gradually, and that the world has to get accustomed to all novel situations. I happened to see Mr. Perkins the first time he rode a bicycle on the road, and his performance certainly justified the prediction that he would look like a guy to the end of his days, and yet he glides past me now with the ease and nonchalance of a possible “scorcher.” Similarly, if women were given universal suffrage, there would be a deal of fluttering in the dove-cotes for the first generation or so. Doubtless four-fifths of womankind would refuse or neglect to vote at all, and at least a quarter of those who went to the polls would cast their ballots as tools or blindly. But just so soon as it was understood that it was no less a woman’s duty to vote than it was to attend to her back hair, she would be educated from that point of view, and her present crass ignorance of political matters would be changed into at least a form of enlightenment. Man prides himself on his logic, but there is nothing logical in the argument that because a woman knows nothing about anything now, she can never be taught. If we have been content to have her remain ignorant for so many centuries, does it not savor both of despotism and lack of reasonableness to cast her ignorance in her teeth and to beat her about the head with it now that she is eager to rise? Decidedly it is high time for the man who orates tempestuously or argues dogmatically in the name of conservatism against the cause of woman on such flimsy pleas as these, to cease his gesticulations and wise saws. The modern woman is a potential reality, who is bound to develop and improve, in another generation or two, as far beyond the present interesting type as Mrs. Julius Cæsar is an advance on her great-grandmother.

On the other hand, why do those who have woman’s cause at heart lay such formal stress on the right of the ballot as a factor in her development? There can be no doubt that, if the majority of women wish to vote on questions involving property or political interests, they will be enabled to do so sooner or later. It is chiefly now the conviction in the minds of legislatures that a large number of the intelligent women of their communities do not desire to exercise the right of suffrage which keeps the bars down. Doubtless these bodies will yield one after another to the clamor of even a few, and the experiment will be tried. It may not come this year or the next, but many busy people are so certain that its coming is merely a question of time that they do not allow themselves to be drawn into the fury of the fray. When it comes, however, it will come as a universal privilege, and not with a social or property qualification. I mention this simply for the enlightenment of those amiable members of the sex to be enfranchised who go about sighing and simpering in the interest of drawing the line. That question was settled a century ago. The action taken may have been an error on the part of those who framed the laws, but it has been settled forever. There would be no more chance of the passage by the legislature of one of the United States of a statute giving the right of suffrage to a limited class of women than there would be of one prescribing that only the good-looking members of that sex should be allowed to marry.

Many people, who believe that woman should be denied no privilege enjoyed by man which she really desires to exercise, find much difficulty in regarding the right of suffrage as the vital end which it assumes in the minds of its advocates. One would suppose, by the clamor on the subject, that the ballot would enable her to change her spots in a twinkling, and to become an absolutely different creation. Lively imaginations do not hesitate to compare the proposed act of emancipation with the release of the colored race from bondage. We are appealed to by glowing rhetoric which celebrates the equity of the case and the moral significance of the impending victory. But the orators and triumphants stop short at the passage of the law and fail to tell us what is to come after. We are assured, indeed, that it will be all right, and that woman’s course after the Rubicon is crossed will be one grand march of progress to the music of the spheres; but, barring a pæan of this sort, we are given no light as to what she intends to do and become. She has stretched out her hand for the rattle and is determined to have it, but she does not appear to entertain any very definite ideas as to what she is going to do with it after she has it.

Unquestionably, the development of the modern woman is one of the most interesting features of civilization to-day. But is it not true that the cause of woman is one concern, and the question of woman suffrage another? And are they not too often confounded, even deliberately confounded, by those who are willing to have them appear to be identical? Supposing that to-morrow the trumpet should sound and the walls of Jericho fall, and every woman be free to cast her individual ballot without let or hindrance from one confine of the civilized world to another, what would it amount to after all by way of elucidating the question of her future evolution? For it must be remembered that, apart from the question of her development in general, those who are clamoring for the ballot have been superbly vague so far as to the precise part which the gentle sex is to play in the political arena after she gets her rattle. They put their sisters off with the general assertion that things in the world, politically speaking, will be better, but neither their sisters nor their brothers are able to get a distinct notion of the platform on which woman means to stand after she becomes a voter. Is she going to enter into competition with men for the prizes and offices, to argue, manipulate, hustle, and do generally the things which have to be done in the name of political zeal and activity? Is it within the vista of her ambition to become a member of, and seek to control, legislative bodies, to be a police commissioner or a member of Congress? Those in the van decline to answer, or at least they do not answer. It may be, to be sure, the wisdom of the serpent which keeps them non-committal, for they stand, as it were, between the devil and the deep sea in that, though they and their supporters would perhaps like to declare boldly in favor of competition, or at least participation, in the duties and honors, they stand in wholesome awe of the hoarse murmur from the ranks of their sisters, “We don’t wish to be like men, and we have no intention of competing with them on their own lines.” Accordingly, the leaders seek refuge in the safe but indefinite assertion that of course women will never become men, but they have thus far neglected to tell us what they are to become.

It really seems as though it were time for woman, in general congress of the women’s clubs assembled, to make a reasonably full and clear statement of her aims and principles – a declaration of faith which shall give her own sex and men the opportunity to know precisely what she is driving at. Her progress for the last hundred years has been gratifying to the world, with the exception of pig-headed or narrow-minded men, and civilization has been inestimably benefitted by the broadening of her intelligence and her interests. But she has now reached a point where there is a parting of the ways, and the world would very much like to know which she intends to take. The atmosphere of the women’s clubs is mysterious but unsuggestive, and consequently many of us feel inclined to murmur with the poet, “it is clever, but we don’t know what it means.” Unrepressed nervous mental activity easily becomes social affectation or tomfoolery, in the absence of a controlling aim or purpose. To exhaust one’s vitality in papers or literary teas, merely to express or simulate individual culture or freedom, may not land one in an insane asylum, but it is about as valuable to society, as an educating force, as the revolutions of the handle of a freezer, when the crank is off, are valuable to the production of ice-cream. For the benefit of such a congress, if haply it should be called together later, it will not be out of place to offer a few suggestions as to her future evolution. In this connection it seems to me imperative to go back to the original poetic conception of woman as the wife and mother, the domestic helpmate and loving, self-abnegating companion of man. Unedifying as this formula of description may seem to the active-minded modern woman, it is obvious that under existing physiological conditions she must remain the wife and mother, even though she declines to continue domestic, loving, and self-abnegating. And side by side with physiological conditions stands the intangible, ineffable force of sexual love, the poetic, entrancing ecstasy which no scientist has yet been able to reduce to a myth or to explode. Schopenhauer, to be sure, would have us believe that it is merely a delusion by which nature seeks to reproduce herself, but even on this material basis the women’s clubs find themselves face to face with an enemy more determined than any Amazon. A maid deluded becomes the sorriest of club members.

What vision of life is nobler and more exquisite than that of complete and ideal marital happiness? To find it complete and ideal the modern woman, with all her charms and abilities, must figure in it, I grant; the mere domestic drudge; the tame, amiable house-cat; the doting doll, are no longer pleasing parties of the second part. To admit so much as this may seem to offer room for the argument that the modern woman of a hundred years hence will make her of the poet’s dream of to-day appear no less pitiable; but there we men are ready to take issue. We admit our past tyranny, we cry “Peccavi,” yet we claim at the same time that, having taken her to our bosoms as our veritable, loving companion and helpmate, there is no room left, or very little room left, for more progress in that particular direction. Her next steps, if taken, will be on new lines, not by way of making herself an equal. And therefore it is that we suggest the vision of perfect modern marital happiness as the leading consideration to be taken into account in dealing with this question. Even in the past, when woman was made a drudge and encouraged to remain a fool, the poetry and joy and stimulus of life for her, as well as for her despot mate, lay in the mystery of love, its joys and responsibilities. Even then, if her life were robbed of the opportunity to love and be loved, its savor was gone, however free she might be from masculine tyranny and coercion. Similarly, after making due allowance for the hyperbole as to the influence which woman has on man when he has made up his mind to act to the contrary, there is no power which works for righteousness upon him comparable to the influence of woman. There is always the possibility that the woman a man loves may not be consciously working for righteousness, but the fact that he believes so is the essential truth, even though he be the victim of self-delusion. This element of the case is pertinent to the question whether woman would really try to reform the world, if she had the chance, rather than to this particular consideration. The point of the argument is that the dependence of each sex on the other, and the loving sympathy between them, which is born of dissimilarity, is the salt of human life. The eternal feminine is what we prize in woman, and wherever she deflects from this there does her power wane and her usefulness become impaired. And conversely, the more and the higher she advances along the lines of her own nature, the better for the world. Nor does the claim that she has been hampered hitherto, and consequently been unable to show what her attributes really are, seem relevant; for it is only when she develops in directions which threaten to clash with the eternal feminine that she encounters opposition or serious criticism. And here even the excitability and unreasonableness of such men as our friend Julius Cæsar find a certain justification. Their fumes and fury, however unintelligent, proceed from an instinctive repugnance to the departure or deviation from nature which they find, or fear to find, in the modern woman. Once let them realize that there was no danger of anything of the kind, and they would become gentle as doves, if not all smiles and approval.