had been an honour to both sexes--was stigmatized. No priest of God
might approach a woman, scarcely even look at her, and no woman was
allowed to serve at God's altar. Celibacy was a virtue so great in man
that none set apart for the highest duties might marry, and woman was
encouraged to suppress in herself all the sweet and wholesome instincts
for motherhood--an instinct upon which the race hung dependent, one for
which she willingly suffered the sharp pangs of childbirth--and instead
to immure herself in convents and endeavour to find solace in the
spiritual ecstasies of morbid meditation.
Now was woman at last robbed and poor indeed! Her social and civil
equality having been yielded in exchange for protection, her protectors
had bereft her of all moral rights, and denounced as unclean the
function for the perfect performance of which she had paid out all her
goods. It was the triumph of the Oriental idea over the ideals of the
Occident, and so deeply did the Eastern thought stamp itself upon the
Western mind that only to-day the latter begins to free itself from the
yoke of the Asian Paul's fierce egotism of sex. So deeply indeed did
this thought penetrate, that historians do not hesitate to attribute
to this scorn of woman and her mission of childbearing a long delay in
the development of European civilization. The higher spiritual natures,
being more under the influence of the Church, accepted its suggestions
of asceticism and left the baser sort to perpetuate the race and thus
delayed the processes of evolution.
It was the denial by the Church of the beauty and nobility of natural
love that drove the Middle Ages to the invention of chivalry and the
romantic love of the unwedded, that they might evade the ban and find
some outlet for the emotions.
With the Reformation, that first uprising of the Western mind against
Asian domination, men threw off the yoke in so far as it bound their
own necks, and declared the rightness and reasonableness of all their
mental and physical functions. It was no longer a shame for the priest
of God to mate with a woman, nor a weakness for a man to round his
life with the fulness of joy to be found in connubial love, when he at
the same time assumed its duties and responsibilities. The ingrained
contempt of women was not so easily eradicated. Honour the man defined
for himself as integrity, _wholeness_, a development of every power to
its highest possibility. Honour for woman was simply chastity. That is
to say, if she repressed all the animal side of life she might entirely
neglect the spiritual. She might be but indifferently honest, a liar,
a slanderer and a tattler, guilty of every minor baseness, and yet be
held in good and honourable repute. The wonder is that woman's morals
survived at all so false a training!
Centuries of such teaching wrought their wretched work despite all
the forces of nature. Virginity instead of purity became the ideal
of the highest type of woman, who shrank from the fulfilment of
her functions as a stepping down, instead of glorying in it as the
fulfilment of her sacred purpose. What had been urged upon her upon
every side she endeavoured to conform to in the spirit as well as the
letter. Her mind strained towards the virginal as well as her body.
The higher type of woman cried out to man for spiritual rather than
physical love, and she found his natural sane tenderness for her person
brutal rather than beautiful. The young girl, sedulously guarded from
knowledge of the fundamental reasons of her being, cast suddenly
and unprepared into marriage, shrank with disgust from a relation
which her husband--educated in wholeness of thought--regarded as the
culmination of the flower of life into its fruit. It is not too much to
say that four fifths of all modest, pure girls--as a result of their
foolish training--contemplated the sexual relation with the bitterest
reluctance. They had been led to believe that virginity was in itself
a virtue, instead of regarding it only as the sanctification of the
body until such time as it legitimately becomes the temple of life.
With many this feeling survived marriage, and embittered it to both the
wife, who resented what she looked upon as a baser nature in the man,
and to the man who resented, and was rebuffed by the coldness of his
companion.
At least half of the disappointments and failures of marriage arose
from the mistaken training of good women.
Ten years ago this Patristic ideal still had a strong hold upon
the race, but the long centuries of study of the Latin and Greek
literatures in the schools finally, almost suddenly, bore fruit. We
had through our school boys and girls imbibed the spirit of the two
European races whom the Semitic influences had never dominated. One
wonders that some foolish so-called progressives should now be wishing
to drop those literatures from the curriculum of students, though
perhaps their work is done. At all events we hear very little now of
this talk of the inferiority of women.
When the miracles of male achievement are pointed to to-day, women know
enough to say proudly, "Did man make this? Well, I made man"; and is
content.
May 4. Seville.
The Beauty of Cruelty.
What a people are these,--these Spaniards! This afternoon--Sunday--I
saw my first bull-fight. One need never wonder again at the Roman Arena
and its horrors. It is as incredible that human beings can sit through
such spectacles as that women could have reversed their thumbs when a
staggering, bloody barbarian turned up a glazed eye to seek mercy....
And this, after two thousand years of Catholicism, of Christianity!
These Spaniards say--staring stupidly at your horror--"Mas, no es
Cristianos. They are only animals." Animals!--and yet Christians dare
talk of divine mercy; of their faith having softened hearts, and
sweetened human nature. Civilization has done so, in truth, but where
this faith reigns most arbitrarily such an atrocious spectacle is
permissible; goes undenounced of its priests.
It is not the baser sort alone who love this cowardly butchery. In the
same box with ourselves sat a woman and her two daughters, evidently
members of the upper classes. The arena below was crowded with the
people--women in sulphur-coloured shawls, embroidered with sharp
blues and scarlets--men of all classes--dandies and workmen cheek by
jowl--but the rows of boxes above held the women and children of the
well-to-do, even the aristocracy. The Royal family itself patronizes
the arena.
The women, whose faces I watched instead of the shambles after the
fight began, grew devilish, a hard smile drew their lips back over
their teeth; their eyes glittered; a look of lust strained the lines
about the nose. They forced the children--some of whom cried, and
shrank from the horrid sight--to turn and see the blood and the
struggle.
I believe the secret charm of this gory game to many is the prick that
the sight of blood gives to the senses. The history of war is full of
evidence of this fact--that the sight of horrors spurs the passions. It
was curious to think that many of the people there owed their existence
to just such a stimulus as this. Cruelty thus lies, hereditarily, at
the very roots of their being; intensified in each generation.
For the same reason, I suppose, that so much of my life seems to me
a glamour of tangled shadows, elusive and shifting, with no definite
line between the real and the unreal, between to-day and all the
yesterdays--for that reason the arena's gaunt, windowless walls and
passages seemed startlingly familiar. Equally familiar the yellow,
sand-strewn circle; the glaring blue sky above the bright-coloured
maelström of faces; the whirl of fans all around the ring--as of a
circle of innumerable dancing butterflies; the cries of the venders;
the clang of the trumpets; the glitter of the tinsel and gew-gaws;
the bold rush of the black bull; the quick spatter of the applauding
hands....
No animal was ever more beautiful than this splendid beast, the perfect
focus of power and rage. He knew that he was facing murder. There was
desperation in his glance from the first moment, but he simply didn't
know the meaning of cowardice. He knew there was no use in anything
he might do; that his courage, and beauty, and long battle for life,
would not stir to pity one of those hard, handsome faces with their
dark shaven jaws and tight lips, but he struck at his foes with all his
force in mere sullen fury. He tore open the bellies of the shivering,
sweating, blindfolded horses, who staggered a few steps trailing their
entrails in the sand and then crumpled helplessly; he caught a man in
the breast and tossed him over the barrier with blood spurting from the
hole his horn had made. He himself leaped the fence once, as agile as a
deer, and brushed the crowd back like flies, but he did it all without
a sign of hope, and _never made a sound_.
Pricked, goaded, red streams running over his satin skin and searing
his eyes, stumbling wildly here and there, his sides sunk in, his
muzzle dragging in the dust, dumb, dull fury in his heart at his
useless torture, spurred to new effort by explosive darts that tore
his flesh into gory, pendulous ribbons, hissed by the women, he fell at
last upon his knees in blind helplessness....
How it ended I don't know. A rage of horror squeezed my heart till the
tears spurted from my lids. It seemed necessary to seize some weapon
and slaughter indiscriminately the men who were murdering this poor
brute for mere amusement, the women who were hissing his death throes.
In such horrid sequence does cruelty engender cruelty.
The people about me regarded my emotion and retreat with surprise and
contempt. Some such sensation, I suppose, as would have been felt by
a Roman who should have seen me shed tears when the big cats of the
arena crushed the bones of some brave young barbarian or Christian.
These creatures were so far beneath him in the scale of existence that
he could not conceive of any poignancy of suffering or emotion in such
a mere animal. Was not one hair of a Roman worth many sparrows--or
Christians?
The Jewish democrat tried to teach the world to recognize the value of
the individual, the sanctity of each human life--when will a Christ of
the beasts arise?
May 5.
This old world, with its horrors and its beauties, how tame it makes
our smug, comfortable America appear!... Yesterday I wished to make a
hecatomb of the Spaniards. To-day I forgive them everything because
of the Sevillian dancers. My lusts are all of the eye. I can quite
conceive Herod tossing the Baptist's head to the supple Salome in an
ecstasy of approval. Dancing, when it is good, is more beautiful to me
than music. And this dancing is very good.
The muscular gymnastics, which modern Italy has imposed upon the world
as dancing, are as dissimilar from the real thing as the fiorituri
singing is from the old bel canto. The Spaniards make dancing--as all
arts should be made--the poetical expression of life and love. Such
ardour and seduction, such abandon to the joy of living, such rage and
daring, such delicate coquetry and wild wooing!... there is nothing
like it out of Spain, the country where they torture helpless animals
for sport.
Is there, perhaps, some secret tie between cruelty and beauty; between
crime and art? It is certain that religious reformers have always
thought so, and have acted with logical fury. In our peaceful, decent
country, beauty, except such as Nature herself affords, is rare. A
race that loves its neighbour as itself seems incapable of creating
an art. The good Swiss have done nothing for the mind's delight: the
virtuous Spartans could not even appreciate loveliness when they saw
it. Nearly all the great periods of flowering in art come after the
roots of a nation have been watered in blood, after some frightful
_crise_ of suffering. It would seem as if bringing forth must be always
accompanied by birth-pangs.
May 7. Granada.
The Duke of Wellington's Trees.
H---- said that the greatness of a people depended upon its trees.
This sounded rather cryptic, and I entreated him to be more diffuse.
We were walking home from that enchanted garden, owned by the
Pallavicini, which rewarded the Moor for betraying his city. The May
moon was shining on the white mountain tops, and the jargoning of the
snow-brooks sounded about our feet. The air smelled of orange flowers
and roses, and the nightingales were _shouting_ in the gloom of those
one hundred thousand trees planted by the Duke of Wellington.
"This Spanish peninsula," H---- said, "under the rule of the Moors,
supported thirty millions of people in comfort. The Christian kings
allowed the upland forests to be ruthlessly sacrificed, and now look at
Spain."
"One swallow"--I quoted. "Will one instance support a theory?"
"No; but I could give you a dozen. Carlyle and the rest of the
historians have talked the fearfulest rot about France under the
monarchy which preserved her forests. Of course, every one has weakly
credited the stories of oppression and starvation in aristocratic
France. And yet the sons of these peasants, who were pitifully pictured
snatching at leaves of those forests for food, overran Europe. I don't
believe that children bred in starvation could ever have had the
vitality to be conquerors. At all events, when the land was divided and
the forests delivered to spoliation, the population of France began
to decline. Possibly the modern effort at reforesting the country may
arrest that decline."
"Just listen to the noise of those nightingales," I said. "Do you
suppose we shall be able to sleep?"
May 15. Naples.
The Boy with the Goose.
The Pompeian bronze, which the guide books and catalogues name The Boy
with the Goose, is quite wrongly named. The lad carries a wine-skin.
The rude, swollen outlines of the pig are clear, and the attitude of
the boy one may see any water-seller in Tangier assume when called
upon for a drink--the arm raised, the body tilted back upon the hip to
elevate the lip of the skin, so that no more water may flow than is
needed. The whole, a delicious bit of _genre_, smiling and vivid after
two thousand years.
There is a curious vitality of a trifling custom discoverable here in
the Pompeian museum. The great bronze horses of Balbo have forelocks
wrapped and twisted in exactly the same fashion that still prevails
all along this Neapolitan shore. The breed has changed utterly; bone
and structure have altered and shrunk, but the vetturino, who drives
through the streets of Naples to-day, twists up that bit of hair in
exactly the same manner as did the coachman of Glaucus or Balbo.
May 30. Rome.
A God Indeed.
How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of--Apollo!... I have
to-day, for the first time, seen a god.
He stands in the Vatican, and follows, with upthrown head and
far-seeing eye, the flight of the golden arrow that slays the serpent
of the miasmatic marsh. One feels a sad tenderness for the poor
bleeding deity, who hangs dead and helpless from a thousand crucifixes
here in Rome, but to-day, for the first time in my life, I felt the
impulse to fall on my knees and worship. Here is at last, and indeed
a god, whose fine feet disdain the earth, whose proud youth never
knew suffering or defeat. Here is the embodiment of the ideal of the
European--beauty, health, power. How he must smile to stand here,
merely a statue, in the place where the Christian reigns, amid luxury
and pomp, in the name of the sorrowful Hebrew democrat who had not
a place to lay his head. Apollo's ideal, his worship, still remains
dominant, though they call his religion by another name. The European
remains, and always will remain, a pagan; none more pagan than the
popes with their lust for temporal power.
Only here in Rome is it possible to realize the long struggle for
supremacy between the European and Semitic ideas; for here is
gathered the bulk of the relics of Greece--mother and nurse of our
race--who early broke the bonds of Asiatic thought and sought her own
development, material rather than spiritual (if one accepts the theory
that spirit and matter are divisible), sensuous rather than mystical,
concerned more with the well-being of the body and the freedom and
vigour of the mind than with the condition of the soul. She who threw
herself with passion into the arms of Nature, and worshipped only the
sublimated human characteristics and visible natural forces deified
into exquisite personifications. She who exalted the beauty and health
of the body into a cult, strove after the demonstrable truths of
science, and loved man as he was--humorously loved him with all his
faults and limitations, rather than an impossible ideal of him.
Here in Rome one finds all the records of the next great development
of the European Erd-geist--the growth of its genius in military,
social, and political organization. Still, as in Greece, clinging to
the aristocratic ideal; to the rule of the strong and gifted. The fruit
did not exist for the benefit of the vine; the vine existed to produce,
to nourish, to minister to the perfect culmination of its species in
the fruit, which drank its sap as of right. Here again the European
followed Nature, that Arch-Aristocrat who destroys multitudes to
produce a few perfect specimens--whose right is always might.
The Asian conquests brought again inroads of Asian thought; more
particularly the thought of that small tribe, the quintessential
of Semitism, which was ever engaged in revolt against nature, and
maintaining democratic convictions in the teeth of all experience.
Impatient of rulers, but submissive to those who scourged the impulses
of their appetites. Scornful of kings, and turning from beauty and
genius to exalt the insane and insect-ridden fakir with knotted unshorn
locks who muttered vague prophecies. Struggling always to escape from
the grip of the inevitable cruelties of natural forces by opposing to
them bloody sacrifices and cruel self-restraints--flowering at last
into that supreme incarnation of the Semitic mind called Jesus Christ,
who wrested from asceticism a dream of a panacea for the brutalities of
the laws of life. The misshapen and undeveloped fruit of the tree of
existence, the windfalls--always a vast majority--received with ecstasy
this new gospel, absurd but fascinating, which denied actualities and
promised impossibilities. The feeble majority clutched at a power
denied them by nature, and only by outwardly accepting the new tenets
were the strong few able to maintain their old dominance.
Nietsche's "blond savage" pouring in from the north found Rome
disintegrated by this Asian influence, and unable to discern that the
new faith was not an integral part of the civilization whose splendour
dazzled him, accepted this theory of life as part of the lesson he set
himself humbly to learn at the feet of Italy.
Hence followed that blind welter of mediævalism; the material genius of
the European race struggling in the bonds of a creed entirely foreign
and unsympathetic. The strong still ruled, as always, but ruled by new
formulæ, and moistened with blood and kneaded by swords the hard paste
of the European Aryan was leavened by Semitism. Not willingly; never
entirely. A thousand years after Rome's acceptance of the new cult the
re-discovery of the old art and philosophy of Greece intoxicated Europe
with joy. Here was something of her own--natural to her--sympathetic.
The Renaissance became an ecstasy of negation of the heavy yoke under
which her neck had so long been bowed. Learning again was glorious.
The philosopher dared assert his superiority to dirty, ignorant scions
of the gutter, who had claimed equality with sovereigns by reason
of not eating three meals a day, and because of the virtue which lay
in the frequent recitation of gibberish. Art abandoned its endless
repetitions of a single theme, and essayed in faltering delight to
rival the glorious fragments of those who had made nature their model
and had joyed to picture life in all its rich grace and charm. The
Western world stood once more upon its feet and burst into a rapture of
creation. It laughed to scorn the narrow commands of Semitic asceticism
against the graven image. Once more it allowed the beauty of visible
nature to pour through its veins in a rich, fecundating flood.
But after all, the leaven had reached every part, and had tinctured
it past any possible casting out. Never could the European be free of
Asian influence. The pendulum has swung back and forth ever since--ever
moving a little higher toward the side of the natural, material
development of the race, but ever checked and brought back to the old
Jewish revolt against nature. To-day the influence of Asia shows
itself in the absurdities of democracy, the phantasies of socialism.
... One of the most curious phases of the whole question is that the
Jew--dispersed throughout the Western world--has entirely succumbed to
the very ideas which he overthrew. He is the artist, the materialist of
our times!
June 1.
A Question of Skulls.
The portrait busts of the Romans were their highest achievements
in art. One sees literally thousands of them in Italy, and their
painstaking accuracy is obvious. What is to me most interesting is
that the sculptured Roman head and face might easily be taken for a
portrait of the English people of to-day. In any congregation of the
English governing classes will be found constantly reproduced the long,
narrow skull, the bold aquiline nose, the stern lips and chin, and that
clean fleshless outline of the Roman--resembling the keen modelling of
the head of the high-bred horse--repeated so frequently in marble and
porphyry in all these museums.
Can it be that Empire reproduces the type? Yet ethnologists trust more
to the shape of the skull in the study of race affinities than to any
other proof. The modern Italian skull is the extreme opposite in type;
is short and broad; so indeed is the skull of all the continental races
of Europe. I know that the skull measurements are not supposed to give
this result, but to the eye the English alone seem to possess this
long, narrow skull.
Amusing also is it to remark that the Roman women were not handsome.
In both races the resemblance between the sexes is too strong. The
fine, bony, equine type, so admirable in the male Roman and Englishman,
becomes hardness in the women, who lack seduction and charm. Also
curious to note, there is the same proud grace of costume and coiffure
in the men; the same ugliness and lack of taste in the arrangement of
the hair and dress of the women of the two races.
London. June 30.
The Modern Woman and Marriage.
H---- and I dined last night with Mary L---- at the Carleton, and H----
asked her, in his large generic fashion, what everybody had been doing
at home during our absence.
"Oh, having their appendices cut out and getting divorced!" she said
flippantly, and H---- laughed outrageously, so that people turned and
stared. It was probably the lobster we ate that made me think her
remark more pathetic than funny while I turned it over in my mind all
the long hours I lay awake.
Howells has said, with only humorous apology, that his sex, after
nineteen hundred years, is but imperfectly monogamous, and yet our
modern women are beginning to treat marriage so disrespectfully, and
change partners for life as light-heartedly as if the engagement was as
unimportant as an engagement for a dance!
That even this imperfect measure of self-denial and fidelity has been
arrived at by men seems to me to be almost solely due to the women of
the past. I know the Church claims--in her usual arrogant way--that she
should have the credit of it, but Lecky says in his "European Morals":
"The first consequence of the prominence of asceticism was a profound
discredit thrown upon the domestic virtues. The extent to which this
discredit was carried, the intense hardness of heart and ingratitude
manifested by the saints towards those who were bound to them by the
closest of earthly ties, is known to few who have not studied the
original literature on the subject. These things are commonly thrown
into the shade by sentimentalists who delight in idealizing the
devotees of the past. To break by his ingratitude the heart of the
mother who had borne him, to persuade the wife who adored him that it
was her duty to separate from him for ever, to abandon his children,
uncared for and beggars, to the mercies of the world, was regarded by
the true hermit as the most acceptable offering he could make to his
God."