this ancient voice of the spirit breathing the accumulated experience
of time, and then it imposes upon him the ripened wisdom of its long
retrospect of the generations, and man creates religions--by which he
does not square his conduct--or philosophies--whose bit he immediately
takes between his teeth. But for the most part he stops his ears to the
soul's stern, sad preaching with the thick wax of sentimentalism, and
that undying determination that life shall be not what it is, but what
he wishes it to be--and so stumbles along, through ever-renewed pangs
and tragedies, after a mirage in the hard desert of existence, to whose
stones and flints, despite his bruises, he will not turn his eyes. And
well it is for us that upon many the mantle of flesh lies so warm and
thick that this ghost called consciousness of self cannot chill their
blood with his dank wisdom breathed from out a world of graves. In
the hearts of such as these all the sweet illusions of existence came
to full and natural bloom. To their lusty egoism life has all the
exhilaration and freshness of a new and special creation.
Far otherwise is it with the haunted man, whose dwelling is blighted
by that cold presence with its terrible memory. Forever echoes through
his chambers the cry that hope will be unfulfilled, that love will die,
the morning fade, that what has been will be again and forever again;
that the waters of life will climb the shore only to crawl back again
into the blind deeps of eternity; that the unit is forever lost in the
eternal ebb and flux of matter. Endeavour can find no footing in this
profundity of experience. To all desire, all aspiration, the ghost says
in a paralyzing whisper:
"Scipio, remember that thou art a _man_--that everything has been done
even if thou doest it not--that everything will be done whether thou
doest it or no.... Where are the poems that were written in Baalbec?
Where the pictures that were painted in Tadmor of the Wilderness? Are
there fewer pictures and poems to-day because the men who made them
are not? Who was prime minister to the bearded King of Babylon? Where
is his fame?... Ay, drink this cup if you will, but you know well the
taste of it is not good at the bottom. You have drunk it a thousand
thousand of times, and the taste was never good, and yet you will drink
it a thousand times again, hoping always that it will be good."...
And the haunted man sits with idle hands and withered purpose,
listening always to the voice, while his neighbours push loudly on to
die futilely but gloriously in the unending battle.
"An end-of-the-century disease," say these full-fed, happy egotists
with lowered breath and eyes askance as they pass the haunted
house. "The mould of age has fallen upon him and made him mad." Yet
before the walls of Troy these two--the ghost-ridden, and the happy
egotist--battled for the glowing shadow of a woman whom neither man
loved nor desired. Achilles, blackly melancholy in his tent, heard the
old voice cry
"ἐν δὲ ἰῇ τιμῇ ἠμὲν κακὸς ἠδὲ καὶ ἐσθλός"
and disdains the greatness of life and the littleness of it. To
an iron inevitableness of fate he opposes only indifference and an
unbending courage. That which has been will be, and the end is death
and darkness. He has no illusions. He wars neither for love of country
nor love of Helen. If Troy falls nothing is gained. If the Greeks fail
nothing will be lost. In time all the sweat and blood shed upon Ilium's
windy plain will evaporate into a mere mist of uncredited legend. In
Achilles, the other self, the _alter ego_, is the stronger man. The
ghost of dead experience is as living as he.
Not so is it with Hector. All the passions of humanity are as new and
fresh to him as if none before himself had known them. He looks neither
forward nor back. The present is his concern. What though men have died
and been forgotten, he will not lessen his utmost effort, even to the
giving up of his life to save Troy. That is to him the one thing of
importance. So robust is his courage, his faith, his love, that the sad
spirit of memory within him cannot speak loud enough to make him hear.
There is no warring of dual personalities in him; he is aware of but
one--that rich momentary incarnation called Hector, more potent than
the memories and experiences of the thousands of lives that preceded
him, that gave him existence.
What though Achilles was right; what though both be but dust and legend
now--who would not choose that flash of being called Hector--Hector
dragged at the chariot-heel of Achilles--Hector with wife enslaved and
children slaughtered and his city's proud towers levelled with the
plain, rather than to have been the haunted victor, triumphing but not
triumphant; fighting without purpose or hope? The same end indeed came
to both, but one died as he lived, for what he thought a glorious end,
while the other too passed away--but with the cold knowledge that both
deaths were fruitless and vain.
Troy is a dream, but the battle forever is waged between the fresh
incarnation of being and the memories of past being. Every creature
wakes out of childhood aware that he lives not alone in even the
secretest chambers of his life. Which is the _I_ he cannot always say.
The two companions are never at one. Sometimes the struggle breaks
into open flame. Sometimes the one is victor, sometimes the vanquished.
Each fights for Helen, for his ideal of pleasure, of wisdom, or of
good, but in the very handgrips of battle a chilling doubt will fall
between them whether she for whom they war--call her virtue, beauty,
lust, life, what you will--is the real Queen, or only some misleading
eidolon whose true self is hid in distant Sparta; and so the grasp
relaxes, the tense breath falls free, the selves mingle. Man gropes for
truth and finds it vague, intangible, not to be grasped--a dream.
February 17.
"A Young Man's Fancy."
What is that ineffable quality in the air that says _Spring_?
Long ago, as far back as towards the end of January, there came
suddenly one day a sense that the winter was conquered. There has been
much cold weather since--we shall have much cold still, but there is
always a promise in the air.
There is a sad day later in the year when one is aware all at once that
summer is ending, and the warm, mild weeks that follow never console
for that hour's realization that the apex is crossed and the rest of
the path slopes downward. Just such a day comes in one's life,--while
one is still young and strong--a sudden sense that youth is done; the
climacteric of passion passed. Life has a long Indian summer still,
but it's never again the real thing,--that ripening toward fruition;
that ecstasy of expansion and growth. There is no visible change for a
while, yet every day there is an imperceptible fall in the temperature.
Always the nights are growing longer. The flowers drop away one by
one--the sap sinks a little, leaving the extreme delicate twigs
moribund. No one has seen the leaves fall, yet there are fewer upon the
bough--winter is coming.
Age is peaceful, perhaps--but middle age--! The wave clings to the
shore, but the inexorable ebb draws it down relentlessly into the
deep. This is the time that men go _musth_, like old elephants. This
is the period when both men and women do their mad deeds, which belie
all their previous records. It is their one last frantic clutch after
vanishing romance and passion. Men buy a semblance of it from young
women sometimes, and resolutely endeavour to persuade themselves that
it is the real thing--that gold can renew youth, can purchase a second
summer--but they know well that it is only a mechanical imitation.
Those cruel old satirists, the comedy writers, loved to paint the
trembling dotard resolutely shutting his eyes to the lusty young rival
hiding behind the jade's petticoats.
As for the women!--who shall tell the real story of the middle age of
women?--of the confident coquette, who one day turns away to punish her
slave, and finds, when she relents, that his eyes are fixed upon her
daughter?--of the bewildered inspection of the mirror, that still tells
a fluttering tale of curves and colours, though startled experience
shows the eyes of men turning in preference to crude, red-elbowed
girls, obviously her inferior in grace and charm?--of the shock of
finding that the world is no longer much interested in her--the
amazement of the discovery that the handsome lads see little difference
between a woman of thirty-five and one of fifty?--of the shame-faced
misery of learning that the passion, which she has virtuously resolved
to repulse, is given in reality to her niece? Her charm, her sweetness,
her well-preserved beauty is as nothing beside mere raw youth.
Undeveloped figures, flat chests, blotchy complexions, are of more
value than her rounded mellow loveliness. She is pushed from her throne
by giggling girls, who stare at her in hard contempt and wonder openly
what the old creature does lingering belated in this galley.
Though she be called "a fine woman" still, men of all ages will turn
from her to dote upon an empty-headed debutante. Her comprehension and
sympathy, her wit and her learning are less enthralling than the vapid
babblings of red-cheeked misses just out of pinafores. Her heart is as
young as ever; she knows herself capable of a finer, nobler passion
and tenderness than the girl can dream of, yet the selfish, egotistic
emotions of the self-confident chit awake a rapture that would be
dulled by the richest warmth she could give.
"Age, I do abhor thee:
Youth, I do adore thee;
O, my love, my love is _young_!"
That she in her turn elbowed the preceding generation from its place
comforts her not at all. Oh, for again one hour only of the splendid
domination of youth--one rich instant of the power to intoxicate!...
There is nothing for it but to keep such things to one's self, and jog
on quietly and respectably to the end. One has had one's turn.
* * * * *
That mad girl Spring has passed up this way
With a hole in her pockets,
For here lies her money all strewn in the grass--
Broad dandelion ducats.
She'll be needing this wealth ere the end of the year
For a warm winter gown,
Though now she's content with a breast-knot of buds
And a violet crown.
She heard in the green blooming depths of the wood
The voice of a dove,
And she dropped all these flowering coins as she ran
To meet summer and love.
'Twill not serve you to gather from out her wild path
All your two hands can hold--
Only youth and the Spring may buy kisses and mirth
With this frail fairy gold.
February 18.
An Arabian Looking-glass.
There has been great recrudescence of the Essay of late--none of it
very important, I take the liberty of thinking. We moderns have lost
the trick of it. All of us, at least, but Stevenson, and he hardly
seems a modern, so closely is he related to the great classics, with
his inheritance of the Grand Style, like the _bel canto_, now a lost
art. And yet the Essay is a great temptation. Doubtless not one of
all those who go down into the ink-bottle with pens has quite escaped
its seduction. Generally it is, I suspect, merely an outcropping
of the somewhat too widely known need of the artistic nature for
"self-expression" in more definite terms than ordinary work permits.
The young fellows, still walking in the light of the eternal
pulchritudes, are touchingly anxious lest they "falsify
themselves"--pathetically unaware of the supreme unconcern of the
rest of humanity as to their personal veracity. The line between art
and the other thing is drawn just across this zone of egotism. "The
other thing" is a man's expression of himself; Art is the mirror in
which each observer sees only his own face. The Arabian legend of
the prosperous old beggar who, making a pilgrimage to Mecca, left to
his son, as his sole means of support, a looking-glass, and returned
to find the boy starving and gazing into the mirror himself, is
supposed to cynically suggest the uses of judicious flattery, but has
deeper application. Speak of yourself--the world yawns. Talk to it of
itself--rudely, vaguely, profoundly, how you will--and it hangs upon
your lips. Turn the mirror toward it and it says proudly, "Of just
such exalted devotion and sacrifice am I capable," or mutters with a
shudder, "There, but for the grace of God, goes Augustine."
The tenor sings "_Sous ta Fenetre_" and every face is lighted by the
inner shining of romance. The strangest revelations are discerned upon
the countenances of respectable matrons, of rangé men of affairs. They
beat their hands together in a flooding wave of applause, and the
greasy Italian in his uneasy evening dress swells with a strutting
consciousness of his vocal chords, of his method, his upper C, of his
own value.
O tempora! O mores! He is nothing whatever to them. It is only that
in every human heart there is a chord that vibrates to C in alt. They
are quite unaware of him, and of his greasy personality. Every man
is singing with his own soul's voice under the lattice of his first
beloved. Every woman is leaning to listen to a dream lover yearning up
to her through the warm scented moonlight. As for the garlicky loves of
the singer they care not one jot whether he loves or not. It is all a
question of themselves, of a vibration.
March 4.
The Cry of the Women.
I have been clearing out a lot of old books, preparatory to moving,
and have been amused to see how empty and dead many already are, which
a few years since were raging through edition after edition, and were
the subject of so much talk and interest. Already more than half have
grown as desiccated and unimportant as last year's leaves, and their
"timeliness" seems of a time as far past as the deluge. There was
among these dead books a group on the Woman Question, which already,
in so short a space, has lost all its interrogation point. Is it
that there was really no Woman Question, or has the Question already
received an answer?
Usually one is inclined to think that when a book voices with truth
and passion the needs and thoughts of even a portion of humanity, it
has a real claim to be classed as literature, though it fails of the
immortality which is the meed only of such writings as express with
beautiful verity the immortal, unchanging needs of life. But already
one regards with amused indifference yesterday's crop of novels written
by women, with their vague ecstasies of longing, their confused cries
of discontent, their indistinct moans and reproaches, though such a
very short time since those books faithfully expressed the mental
state of the sex, as one could not doubt, seeing the greediness with
which editions were called for of "The Heavenly Twins," "Keynotes,"
"A Superfluous Woman," and their like, or listening to the echoes
awaked by their inchoate sentiments in the feminine mind. Yet the
sum of the protest of all these books by women was like the cry of an
infant--suffering but inarticulate.
I suppose the truth is that even so short a time since free thought
and free speech were still so new to women that, struggling in the
swaddling bands of ignorance and convention, it was small wonder that
she could not state with precision, or even define clearly to herself,
where her pain lay, nor how she would allay it. She knew she was in
revolt against what had been. She could not yet choose what she would
change in the future. Some of them cried out for larger political
rights, others were convinced that the abolition of stays and the
introduction of trousers was all that was needed to produce a feminine
millennium.
"Latch-keys!" cried the browbeaten English girls--"and freedom to be
out after dark like our own brothers. Look at the men. They are quite
happy. It must be the possession of latch-keys that makes them so: give
them also to us."
"No," roundly declared a certain Mona Caird, "what we really need is a
latch-key to let us out of the lifelong oppressive bond of marriage.
It weighs too heavily upon us--let us go free!"
"Nonsense!" contradicted Sarah Grand. "Marriage is all right. What is
wrong is man. He comes to the marriage altar with stained and empty
hands, while he demands that ours be spotless, and heaped with youth,
health, innocence, and faith. He swindles us. Reform man if you would
make us happy!"
"Higher education"--"Equal wages"--"Physical development"--"No
household drudgery"--"Expansion of the ego," cried the conflicting
voices; each with a quack panacea for the disease of discontent.
Can it be that all this was but ten years ago? How quickly ideas are
changing!
I think that this noise among the women was the last wave of the
democratic ideal expending itself. It was their restlessness under a
sense of their inferiority to man. Until the nineteenth century, woman
had been content to accept the male of her kind, with his mental and
physical endowments, as the true standard of human excellence, and to
humbly admit that she permanently failed to reach that standard.
The universality of the democratic ideal aroused in her at last an
unwillingness to admit her innate inferiority, and drove her to a
desperate search for some fountain of Salmacis that should transmute
her to an exact likeness of her long-time lord and superior. The
search, of course, was delayed and confused by that furious and
debasing _fin de siecle_ demand for happiness at all cost. She heard
no talk anywhere of courage, submission, or duty. The later decades
of the democratic century had refused to contemplate the world-old
riddle of the blind Fates who create one vessel to honour and another
to dishonour. So woman, no more than her fellows, would consider the
caprices of destiny which from the union of one man and one woman will
produce an heir to beauty, talent, and success, and from the same
union--without volition or intention upon anyone's part--brings forth
a cripple, an idiot, or the helpless Inadequate, who is foredoomed
to failure with a grim gravitation no human laws or institutions can
arrest. The nineteenth century was a sentimental one; unwilling to
consider unpleasant truths. "All men _are_ born equal," it stubbornly
persisted in asserting, and then was rather shocked when some of its
offspring sought this equality of happiness at the sword's point or the
bomb's fuse--as if content was a coin to be stolen and concealed about
the person of the thief.
Of course, the women finally became infected with the bacillus of
unsound ideas, and struggling against the immutable burden of sex ran
to and fro, crying "Lo, here!" and "Lo, there!" and wailing, "Where
is _my_ happiness? Who has my happiness? You men have stolen and are
keeping it from me!"
A certain part of the charge was true, too. Men had filched from her.
The theft was not a new one. If the statute of limitations could ever
run in crimes against nature it might have almost ceased to be a wrong
in this case, after the lapse of nearly two thousand years.
Morgan in his "Ancient Society," dealing with the question of
_Mütter-Recht_, declares that throughout the earliest period of human
existence regarding which any knowledge is attainable, descent and
all rights of succession were traced through the women of the _gens_
or clans, into which primitive man was organized. Women, as being the
bearers and protectors of the young, were regarded as the natural land
owners, and therefore did not leave their homes to follow the fathers
of their children, lest they should lose their own possessions and
rights of inheritance. Instead, the men married into the sept of their
wives. The power and independence of women was lost at last through the
practice of making female captives in war. These had no land and were
the property of, and dependent upon the will of, their male captor. In
course of time men naturally grew to prefer these subservient wives.
The Arab advises his son: "It is better to have a wife with no claims
of kin and no brethren near to take her part."
Women therefore began to dread capture as the greatest of evils. After
the movements of vast hordes began--the marches of the race columns
across the continents--with their wars of spoliation and conquest,
there was no security save in physical strength, and the females
yielded all claims to the men in return for protection. It was better,
they thought, to be a slave at home than a slave among strangers. Still
the man, while asserting physical superiority, claimed none morally.
Under the pagan rule of Rome, the jurisconsults, by their theory
of "Natural Law," evidently assumed the equality of the sexes as a
principle of their code of equity. Sir Henry Maine says there came a
time "when the situation of the female, married or unmarried, became
one of great personal and proprietary independence; for the tendency of
the later law ... was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity,
while the form of marriage conferred on the husband no compensating
superiority."
Among the Germanic races of the Roman period, a woman was occasionally
ruler of the tribe, and the blue-eyed wife of the roving Barbarian,
as well as the proud Roman matron, were held alike in high esteem for
their functions as wife and mother. The priestess crowned with oak
leaves, officiating at the sylvan altars of the forest, or the Vestal
Virgin serving the fires of the white temples of Rome, were alike
held worthy of speaking face to face with the gods and of conveying
their blessings to man. It was the humble religion of Judea--which
women embraced with ardour, and to which they were early and willing
martyrs--that cursed them with a deadly curse. It denied woman not only
mental and physical, but moral equality with man, and besmirched the
very fountain and purpose of her being with a shameful stain. It made
her presence in the most holy places a desecration, and for the first
time regarded her feminine functions as a disgrace rather than a glory.
And this although the founder of the Christian faith had set an example
of reverence and tenderness for the sex in his own life, and had left
his mother to be raised to a heavenly throne by his worshippers. Never
from his lips had fallen a word that could give warrant for the insult
offered woman by his church. He was the first of all men living to
denounce the injustice of visiting upon the woman the whole penalty
of a double sin, and his life was beautified with the tenderest
friendships with women. But already, before a church had been fairly
organized, Paul was dictating silence to women, covered heads and
supreme submission to the male, and was declaring against marriage as a
weakness. If a man must marry because of his weakness, he might do so,
but not to marry was better.
Scorn of woman and her functions grew. Antagonism to marriage
intensified. Woman by the very law of her existence was a curse and
a temptation to sin. Hear Tertullian--one of the fathers of the
Church--on this subject:
"Do you not know that each one of you is an Eve? The sentence of God on
this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live
too. You are the devil's gateway; you are the unsealer of the forbidden
tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who
persuaded him who the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You
destroyed so easily God's image, man. On account of your desert--that
is death--the Son of God had to die!"
This is but one of a thousand similar insults by the early writers of
the Church--all Patristic books bristle with them.
Lecky, comparing the Roman jurisprudence with the canon or
ecclesiastical law, remarks that "the Pagan laws during the earlier
centuries of the Empire were constantly repealing the disabilities of
women, whereas it was the aim of the canon law to substitute enactments
which should impose upon the female sex the most offensive personal
restrictions and stringent subordination."