because that, alas!--whether it be founded on physical attraction or
mental affinity--is subject to change. Age withers, and custom stales
it: circumstance blights it, a diversity of spiritual growth rends
it apart, and no man or woman can say with certainty that it will
endure for a lifetime. But the fluctuations to which wedded love is
subject are unknown to the self-abnegating instinct of parenthood.
Mutual affection for the offspring will hold together the most opposite
natures; it will rivet for all existence two lives that must otherwise
inevitably spring asunder by instinctive repulsion.
Love of offspring is in man a cultivated emotion; in woman an instinct.
There are women lacking the instinct as there are calves born with
two heads, but for purposes of generalization these exceptions may be
ignored. In many of the lower orders of life the female is obliged to
protect the young from the enmity of the male parent. The alligator
finds no meal so refreshing as a light lunch off his newly hatched
children, and the male swine shares this epicurean taste for tender
offspring. The stallion is a dangerous companion for the mare with colt
at foot, though the colt be of his own get, and many species of male
appear to experience a similar jealousy of the young while absorbing
the attentions of the female. Speaking generally of the animal world,
the young are obliged to look to the mother entirely for food and care
during the period of helplessness. With savage man of the lower grade
the paternal instinct is still faint and rudimentary, and even where
the woman has, through long ages of endeavour, succeeded in cultivating
in the heart of the other parent a fair imitation of her own affection,
this affection, being a cultivated emotion and not an instinct,
frequently breaks down under stress of misbehaviour or frowardness on
the part of the child.
To this end, then,--that end "toward which the whole creation
moves,"--to effect this result of an equal care and affection for the
offspring, all the energies of women have been bent for ages.
She has fought polygamy with incessant hatred; not only for its injury
to herself, but its constant menace to her children. The secret strings
of the woman's heart are wrapped about the fruit of her own flesh,
but the desire of the man is to the woman, and this desire she has
used as a lever to work her will--not consciously, perhaps, not with
reasoned forethought, but with the iron tenacity of blind instinct.
Reasoned will may be baffled or deflected, but water can by no means
be induced to run up hill; and so while woman has been apparently as
fluidly yielding as water--to be led here and driven there according
to the will of her master--she has stuck to her own ends with a silent
persistency that has always tired out opposition at last. She has,
like Charity, suffered all things, endured all things; she has been
all things to all men. She has yielded all outward show of authority;
she has submitted to be scoffed at as an inferior creation, to be
sneered at for feebleness and shallow-mindedness, to be laughed at for
chattering inconsequence, and to be regarded as a toy and trifle to
amuse man's leisure hours, or as a dull drudge for his convenience, for
ends are not achieved by talking about them. All the ages of masculine
discussion of the Eternal Feminine show no reply from her, but to-day
the world is a woman's world. Civilization has, under the unrelaxing
pressure of endless generations of her persistent will, been bent to
her ends. Polygamy is routed, and the errant fancy of the male tamed
to yield itself to a single yoke. She has, "with bare and bloody feet,
climbed the steep road of wide empire," but to-day she stands at the
top--mistress of the world. Man, with his talents, his strength, and
his selfishness, has been tamed to her hand. The sensual, dominant
brute with whom she began what Max Nordau calls "the toilsome, slow
ascent of the long curve leading up to civilization," stands beside her
to-day, hat in hand, her lover--husband; tender, faithful, courteous,
and indulgent.
This is the conquest that has been made, the crown and throne achieved
by the silent, uneducated woman of the past.
Monogamous marriage is the foundation stone on which has been built her
power; a power which, while it has endured to her own benefit, has not
been exercised for selfish ends. She has raised the relation between
man and herself from a mere contract of sensuality or convenience to
a spiritual sacrament within whose limits the purest and most exalted
of human emotions find play. For the coarse indulgence and bitter
enmities of polygamy has been substituted the happiest of bonds, in
which the higher natures find room for the subtlest and completest
felicities, and within which the man, the woman, and the child form a
holy trinity of mutual love and well-being.
To this jewel, so hardly won, so long toiled for, it would be natural
to suppose that woman would cling with all the force of her nature;
all the more as education broadened her capacity for reflection and
deepened her consciousness of self. On the contrary, the little
learning she has so far acquired seems, as usual, a dangerous thing,
and with the development of self-consciousness the keen, unerring
_flair_ of her instinct for the one thing needful has been blunted and
enfeebled. It is not necessary to give undue weight to the blatant and
empty-headed crew who announce marriage to be a failure, and that women
are tired of, and will no longer submit to, child-bearing. There are
crowing hens in all barnyards, and their loud antics never materially
affect the price of eggs.
But that the women of our own time should treat marriage--that
hard-won, dear-bought triumph--with such profligate recklessness amazes
me. We are making ducks and drakes of the treasure heaped up for us by
our mothers. How long will this imperfectly monogamous animal respect
an institution which is all for our benefit, if we ourselves regard it
so lightly?
The modern woman is so spoiled, so indulged, that she does not realize
how much a man gives and how little he gets in marriage. He gives a
half, sometimes--indeed often--more than half, of his earnings, his
name and its honour, his protection and defence of her person, and a
lifelong responsibility for her and her children, and he gets--what?
Her person, and it is to be hoped her affection. The woman of the
present day lays too much stress upon this gift of her person. She
appears to think that this gift alone renders man her eternal debtor.
To speak a little brutally, he knows that he can easily buy a like gift
elsewhere and for a less price.
I remember that last year Alice complained of some of Ned's small
foibles.
"Oh, you must be patient with him," I said. "Think how much he gives
you; home, name, support, protection--everything. He works hard for you
every day. You are under tremendous obligations to him."
"Well, if you put it that way--" she answered resentfully, "but don't I
give him love and affection in return?"
"Yes," I countered triumphantly, "but he gives you equal love and all
these other things beside. It seems to me there's no question who gives
most."
She opened her eyes rather wide and looked thoughtful.
July 17.
The Ideal Husband.
It being the "silly season" a controversy is raging in the daily papers
as to the ideal wife and the ideal husband, and much correspondence is
occurring under various anonyms.
Alas!--the only ideal husband who ever lived married the only ideal
wife ever born. They were cut off in the flower of their youth--some
time during the first years of the Pliocene Period--and minute fossil
fragments of their bones are now worn as relics by pious celibates,
and are said to have worked miracles.
Of so potent an essence are their mere memories, it is said his
knightly ghost haunts the rosy chambers of all maiden dreams, and men
seeking Her like find all other women less desirable because of her
fabled virtues.
I suppose all girls see him more or less in their lovers. Imagination
deceptively moulds their features to a similacrum of that noble
legendary person, until the fierce light which beats upon the married
reveals the unprepossessing traits of plain everyday humanity. Yet
every woman begins her sentimental life with hopes unabated by the
depressing failures of others.
A most quaint and charming creature--this ideal who haunts the dreams
of maidenhood! Compounded all of purity and passion, of chivalry and
grace, of vigour and beauty. He can in moments of excitement tie the
poker into love-knots, and has a hand of velvet with which to touch the
dreamer's curls. A ruler of men, he is to be led by a single golden
hair. Capable of volcanic passion, which renders him indifferent to
meals or to fatigue, he can yet be moved to these ecstasies by but
a single member of the sex, and despite snubs or coquetry can live
for decades upon the mere hope of her favour. He excels in all manly
prowess and diversions, and yet is never guilty of causing the loved
one to mourn his absence during a golf widowhood. He adores poetry
and is superior to all vulgar commercialism, and yet manages--in that
simple fashion known only to ideals--to accumulate a fortune and be
generous in the matter of diamonds. He combines in one stalwart person
all the virtues of Galahad, Arthur, Launcelot, and Baron Rothschild.
Later on the wife develops an ideal less magnificently ornamental than
this choice collection of bric-à-brac virtues. The married idol must
be thoroughly domesticated: prepared to throw himself with enthusiasm
into the study of croup and measles; is deeply versed in the matter
of female domestic service, and yet so full of tact as to be able
to obliterate himself at moments of domestic crisis. Like the ideal
servant, he must be never in the way and never out of it. He must be
uncritical of failure, yet capable of enthusiasm for success; unselfish
as a saint, yet commanding the secret of worldly achievement; and above
all he must be hopelessly blind to the virtues and charms of every
woman but his wife.
Taste as to details may differ according to temperament, nationality,
and social condition, but, broadly speaking, this delightful person
with his eccentric combination of qualities figures in the abstract
affections of all women.
But these are dreams; diversions of those pleasant moments when the
human moth allows itself, with futile richness of imagination, to
consider the star as a possible companion, and it seems useless to hope
that such a person will ever appear in this sinful and unworthy world.
Perhaps from time to time a man who faintly reflects the luminous
charms of this knightly husband-saint does arise to cheer and comfort
the weaker sex and keep their hopes and ideals alive, but the "Mauds,"
and "Charlottes," and "Mrs. S. F. J.s," who have been extolling his
attractions in print, seem not to have prayerfully considered whether
they themselves were fit mates for, or capable of satisfying the ideals
of, this wholly impossible he. There is far less talk about the ideal
wife--for two reasons, I suppose. One is that men have less time for
chattering generalizations, and the other--alas!--is that men are far
less interested in women than are women in men.
The American is supposed to more nearly approach this high standard
than the men of any other nationality, but that typical American
husband of novels has, I must confess, always seemed to me a paltry,
bourgeois creature, with the soul of a bank clerk, a neglected mind,
and with a low estimate and a sort of amused indulgence of women as
pretty, fantastic, inconsequent children with an insane greed of luxury.
Of course, it is heresy to say so, but my observation leads me to
think that American women hold a general position far inferior to the
women of Europe. The American man is pre-eminently generous to them
in material things. Often while he slaves and goes shabby himself
he is willing to metaphorically back a van up to the coal-hole and
fill the cellar full of jewels, but he denies to his women that whose
price is above rubies--his own society. Why is American society made
up of women? What is the cause of our superfluity of women's clubs,
committees, and classes? What place has the middle-aged or elderly
woman in America except as the mother of her daughters, or the
dispenser of her husband's hospitalities and charities?
After the period of sex-attraction has passed women have no power in
America. Who ever sees here, as is so often seen in Europe, an elderly
woman's drawing-rooms filled with politicians, financiers, artists, who
come for the refreshment and stimulation of her ideas and conversation?
Mentally American women do not interest American men.
July 23.
A New Law of Health.
Louisa has become a raging Christian Scientist.
A distant memory returns to me. Once upon a time there was a little
girl who, after the manner of her sex, feared greatly all and sundry
of certain fierce beasts, among which were to be enumerated rats, mice,
bumblebees, and more vividly and especially _DOGS_--whose culminating
direfulness was only to be expressed in italicized capitals. On a day,
being bidden to go across the village street to deliver a note to an
opposite neighbour, she set out, radiating the pleasing results of
soap, brushes, and a clean pinafore, but on reaching the gate came to
a sudden pause. A specimen of the worst of enemies, who seemed to the
perspective of an eye only three feet from the ground to easily rival
an elephant in size, lay prone across the path, lolling an intimidating
tongue, and rolling an eye which, though outwardly calm, might be
guessed to conceal a horrid intent. There was a swish of short starched
skirts, a twinkle of bare knees, and appeal was made to that infallible
power and knowledge which Providence has so wisely placed in mothers.
Being a person of nimble imagination this particular parent, realizing
that a mastiff as large in proportion to her own inches as this one was
to the normal height of five years might well daunt her own courage,
forbore to remonstrate or use reason.
"Here," she said placidly, "is a lump of sugar. Put it on your tongue
and hold it there. Of course, no dog will touch a person who has sugar
on her tongue."
And so fortified, Five Years set forth with a conviction of immunity
that carried her triumphantly past the source of terror. The
incident is not in itself, perhaps, of historic importance, but is a
particularly vivid example of the absolute divorce in the undeveloped
mind between the laws of cause and effect, and in no department of
human thought has that divorce continued so long as in the science
of health. Every one of us can revive out of childhood a memory of
the balm that overspread the injured temple when a sympathetic nurse
bestowed the richly deserved spanking upon the offending chair corner
that had caused the pain, or applied the clearly indicated plaster of
a kiss; and medicine in its long career has followed the intelligent
example of the nursery. But while medicine as a science has passed
out of this stage with the general growth of knowledge, the bulk of
mankind still continues to put sugar on the tongue as a protection
against dogs, to castigate chair corners, and to apply remedies as
unknown to the pharmacopœia as the feminine kiss. Perhaps the
stolen potato carried in the pocket, or the bit of red flannel bound
on the left wrist, are not so trusted a remedy for the pangs of
rheumatism as they were fifty years ago, and the dried heart of a mouse
worn in a bag about the neck seems to have lost its potency against
epileptic seizures, yet the very large sums spent annually upon patent
medicines--rivalling in amount what is known in temperance circles as
the "Drink Bill"--and the rise and popularity of innumerable mushroom
"cures" and systems, proves that the laws of health are still as
heterogeneous from the intelligence of the majority of mankind as are
the laws of the differential calculus.
It would be diverting, were it not so pathetic, to see the constant
endeavour on the part of the multitude to lift itself by its own
hygienic boot-straps in the form of barefoot cures, mind cures, prayer
cures, cures by clairvoyance, by magnetism, red or blue lights, or by
pilgrimages and relics. The child moving about in worlds unrealized is
still the father and epitome of the man, and sees no reason why his own
will, or that of some Power wishing him individually well, should not
break through the immutable sequence of cause and effect, or upset the
machinery of the universe in his behalf. His childish "Let's pretend"
sweeps away for the moment the dull persistency of facts and opens a
world where it is possible to eat one's cake and have it too, and after
dancing escape the bill for the fiddling.
Speaking accurately there is, of course, no such thing as a new
law of health--such laws being of their very nature eternal--but a
consciousness of the hygienic code is as new as was the discovery
not more than a century ago of the forces of electricity, which had,
though the most powerful agent upon the earth, lain ready to our hands
unrecognized throughout recorded time.
The unfortunate fact that the world of knowledge is not a globe is
shown by this--that if, in setting out toward a fixed goal of truth,
one's face is turned in the wrong direction, no length of travel, no
miracle of persistency, ever conducts to the haven where one would
be. A truth of moral geography by no means universally accepted as
yet, and indeed certain inherent tendencies of human nature, will
forever prevent its unanimous acceptance, a chronic childishness of
mind being so common that one would almost despair of the acceptance
of any new truth, were it not that the adult intelligence of the few
eventually imposes its conclusions upon the multitude, or enforces
at least an outward concurrence. The immature-minded many are always
lusting after a sign of the wonderful, and kicking against the pricks
of plain truth. Bullied out of crediting the existence of ghosts and
fairies, they earnestly engage in burning witches, and shamed out of
such mistaken zeal fling themselves into the arms of spiritualist
mediums, flirt with the theosophists, or die under the ministrations
of Christian Scientists. The whole history of supernaturalism has been
the history of travel in the wrong direction--a wrong turning that had
its beginning in a childish impatience that would attain to its end by
sudden leaps in lieu of dusty plodding along the highway that led by
slow windings to the desired end.
Man found painful barriers of time, space, and physical decay
fencing him out of his Eden of gratified desire, and like a child
he straightway fell to dreaming of flying carpets, of magic lamps,
of transmutable metals, of fountains of youth and elixirs of life.
At first these miracles were thought to be the gifts of shadowy,
higher powers, who were happily superior to the cruel limits of
material existence, and might give their assistance according to their
capricious elfin fancy. Later, man began to believe that in himself
lay the powers which were to break the chains that bound him the
unhappy slave of distance, of the need for labour, of the tyrannies
of nature, with her resistless heat and cold, storm and flood, pain
and age. A glimmering of the truth, this, at last, but only a faint
reflection on the horizon of the rising sun, on which he had turned his
back. There followed a period of fasts and macerations whose courage
and persistency was to make the gods tremble in respectful terror--a
triumph over material passions which should give an occult power over
material limitations. The Buddhists stood moveless and speechless until
the birds reared their young in their hair, and thereby were supposed
to grow so mighty that the mountains rocked beneath the weight of their
thoughts, and space and time were annihilated.
Superb energies, passionate patience and ardour, master intellects,
were wasted in the long endeavour to find some means by which nature
could be conquered and man made master of circumstance--all given
fruitlessly; thrown into that bottomless pit of error never to be
filled. And these earnest, misguided travellers--so blinded were
they--when one of their number turned about in the other direction
promptly fell upon him and beat him into submission, as one who would
check the struggle towards light and knowledge. Even now that the
fact is accepted that nature is to be conquered by her own natural
means only, and that supernaturalism is a waste and quaking morass
upon which no edifice of truth is to be reared, there are many--sadly
many--descendants of Lot's wife casting longing glances back to the
Sodom of their intellectual sins. It is nothing to them that having
once faced about in the right direction the same amount of effort,
properly directed, has achieved that for which the supernaturalists had
for ages striven in vain.
Eating his due amount of food and attaching no mystical significance
to anything, man tore his way through the heart of mountains, flashed
his thoughts under the wastes of ocean, sent his voice across a
thousand miles, sailed into the teeth of the wind, devoured space with
steam, reared palaces more lofty than Aladdin dreamed of, and--his own
Kobold--dived into the darkness and fetched up gold and gems more than
the fairy tales ever knew. He made himself lord of the visible earth,
of time, of distance, of wave and wind. He laid his hands upon all the
forces which had awed his childhood and forced them to work miracles
beside which the fables of the Kabbalists seemed tame and feeble. And
in spite of this there remain men and women who are more awed by a
banjo flying through a dark room than by the telephone; who find the
untying of knots in a cabinet, or the clutches of damp hands when the
lights are turned down, more important than the automobile. It is the
attitude of mind of a child, who is more interested by rabbits coming
out of a conjurer's hat than by wireless telegraphy.
There is as great an inequality in the inheritance of health as in
the heirship of wealth or brains. Some are born with a fortune of
vigour and soundness so large that not a lifetime of eager squandering
will leave them poor, and others enter the world paupers of so dire a
need that no charity of medicine will ever raise them to comfort; but
most of us have just that mediocre legacy of vitality which makes us
indistinguishable units in the mass. It lies in the hands of each to
improve or waste that property as he chooses, for there are self-made
men physically as well as financially, and spendthrifts of health
come to as sorrowful an end as prodigals of gold. The body is a realm
where a wise ruler brings happiness as surely as a foolish one ensures
distress, and wisdom here, as elsewhere, lies in the observance of
natural laws.