dominated by two autocratic sovereigns, who overawe others by the
consistent and continuous policy only possible to a despotism. The
republics of France and of South America are the prey of a horde of
adventurers who only alternate despotisms; the armaments of the world
are so pretentious that each fears to wield so terrible a weapon. The
great nations are dividing the weak among themselves as lions do their
prey. All nations are exaggerating their barriers and differences.
Russia is repudiating the Occidental languages and civilizations which
she at first received so gladly. Hungary has abandoned the German
tongue, and the Hungarians, Czechs, and Bohemians, held together by
the bond of Austria, are restive and mutually repellent. The Celt
revives and renews his hatred of the Saxon, and in Ireland and in
Wales the aboriginal tongues and literatures are being disinterred
and taught as a means of destroying the corporate nationalism of
the British Isles. The Bretons disclaim their part and interest in
France. The Spanish empire has fallen into jealous and unsympathetic
fragments. The Hindus are clamouring for an India for the Indians. All
are rivals; envenomed, and seeking domination. And America,--America,
the supreme demonstration of the democratic ideal,--what of her?
America has embarked upon imperial wars: refuses sanctuary to the poor
and oppressed as inadmissible paupers, and laughs at the claims to
brotherhood and citizenship of any man with a yellow skin.
The church, which is most opposed to individual liberty of thought,
has been reconquering great territory in the very citadels of free
conscience. One large body of Protestants is repudiating its protests
against irresponsible authority, and basing its claims rather upon
appeal to ancient precedent.
Science has one by one torn in pieces and scattered the iridescent
bubbles of democracy's sentimental visions. The Ghetto is open, but the
Jews are still persecuted. A Calas is no longer sacrificed to bigoted
churchmen, but an intolerant army make possible the Affaire Dreyfus.
Zola, after a century of democracy, is called upon once more to take
up the work of Voltaire. Woman is still waiting for political equality
with man. But perhaps the most surprising result is man's change in
his attitude towards himself. _Man_, who spelled himself with reverent
capital letters, who pictured the universe created solely for his
needs,--who imagined a Deity flattered by his homage and wounded by his
disrespect--Man, who had only to observe a respectable code of morals
to be received into eternal happiness with all the august honours due a
condescending monarch, had fallen to the humility of such admissions as
these....
"What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated
dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,
feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon
with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that glitter in his face; a
thing to set children screaming;-- ... Poor soul here for so little,
cast among so many hardships filled with desires, so incommensurate
and so inconsistent; savagely surrounded, savagely descended,
irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives, ... infinitely
childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down
to debate of right or wrong and the attributes of the Deity; rising up
to battle for an egg or die for an idea.... To touch the heart of his
mystery we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy,
the thought of duty, the thought of something owing to himself, to his
neighbour, to his God; an ideal of decency to which he would rise if
possible, a limit of shame, below which if it be possible he will not
stoop.... Not in man alone, but we trace it in dogs and cats which we
know fairly well, and doubtless some similar point of honour sways the
elephant, the oyster and the louse, of whom we know so little"--
Alas, Poor Yorick! How a century of liberty has humbled him. It is
thus the successors of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of the believers in
the perfectibility of man, speak--saying, calmly, "The Empire of this
world belongs to force"--and that "Hitherto in our judgments of men we
have taken for our masters the oracles and poets, and like them we have
received for certain truths the noble dreams of our imaginations and
the imperious suggestions of our hearts. We have bound ourselves by the
partiality of religious divinations, and we have shaped our doctrines
by our instincts and our vexations.... Science at last approaches with
exact and penetrating implements ... and in this employment of science,
in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a
new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to
discover them."
We must not forget to consider a little the amusing change our century
has seen in the alteration of its heroic ideals. For the sentimental
rubbish, the dripping egotism of a Werther, of a Manfred, in whom
the young of their day found the most adequate expression of their
self-consciousness, we have substituted the Stevenson and Kipling
hero--hard-headed, silent, practical, scornful of abstractions,
contemptuous of emotions, who has but two dominant ideals, patriotism
and duty; who keeps his pores open and his mouth shut.
The old democratic shibboleths still remain on our lips, are still used
as if they were truisms, but in large measure we have ceased to live
by them, we have lost all our cocksureness as to their infallibility.
We give frightened sops to our anarchical Cerberus. We realize that
despite all we so proudly decreed the strong still rule and plunder
the weak, and weak still impotently rage and imagine a vain thing of
legislation as a means of redressing this endless inequality.
Much of good we have given. How could an ideal so tender, so beautiful,
so high of purpose, fail of righting a thousand wrongs?
How could those sweet, foolish tears fail to water the hard soil of
life and cause a thousand lovely flowers of goodness and gentleness to
bloom? That we have not solved the riddle of the Sphinx, that we have
not found the secret of happiness, is hardly cause for wonder or shame.
Neither will our successors find it, but it is interesting to speculate
as to what clue they will use to guide them in the search. It is plain
that our ideals, our formulæ, are being cast aside as inadequate, but
the new century is coming in with no programme as yet announced. It is
thoughtful, silent; it avoids our drums and shoutings and vociferous
over-confidence.
What will be its Time-Spirit, since ours plainly will not serve? Will
the wage-earners shear the bourgeoisie of their privileges as we shore
the nobles a century ago--or will liberty sell herself to authority
again in return for protection against the dry hopelessness of
socialism, or the turmoil of anarchy? Or will the new generation evolve
some new thought, undreamed of as yet--some new and happier guess at
the great central truth at which we forever grasp and which forever
melts and eludes?
February 11.
The Abdication of Man.
In the midst of all these excursions and alarums of war, and
preparation for war, a sudden and great silence has fallen upon the
everlasting discussion of the relations of the sexes. Before the
stern realities of that final and bloody argument of Republics, as
well as of Kings, further dissection of the Women Question has been
deferred. The most vociferous of the "unquiet sex" have been regarding
respectfully the sudden transformation of the plain, unromantic man
who went patiently to business every morning in a cable car, and sat
on a stool at a desk, or weighed tea, or measured ribbon, into a hero
ready to face violent annihilations before which even her imagination
recoils. The grim realisms of life and death have made the realism
of such erstwhile burning dramas as The Doll House shrink into the
triviality of a drama fit only for wooden puppets. Sudden and violent
readjustments of ideas are apt to be brought about when human relations
are jarred into their true place by the thunder of cannon. War
legitimatizes man's claim to superiority. When the sword is drawn he
is forced to again mount that ancient seat of rule from which he has
only recently been evicted; or rather from which he has himself stepped
down. The democracy of sex at once becomes ridiculous--the old feudal
relation reasserts itself.
It is interesting to note that there has not been one feminine voice
raised to protest against the situation. The entire sex, as represented
in this country, has, as one woman, fallen simply and gladly into the
old place of nurse, of binder of wounds, of soother and helpmeet. Not
one has claimed the woman's equal right to face villainous saltpetre,
or risk dismemberment by harbour mines.
I believe this to be because woman prefers this old relation. I believe
that if man were willing she would always maintain it; that it depends
upon him whether she returns to it permanently or not. I believe that
her modern attitude is not of her own choosing--that man has thrust
that attitude upon her. For the oldest of all empires is that of
man; no royal house is so ancient as his. The Emperors of Japan are
parvenus of the vulgarest modernity in comparison, and the claims of
long descent of every sovereign in Europe shrivel into absurdity beside
the magnificent antiquity of this potentate. Since the very beginning
of things, when our hairy progenitor fought for mastery with the
megatherium, and scratched pictorial epics upon his victim's bones,
the House of Man has reigned and ruled, descending in an unbroken line
from father to son in direct male descent. His legitimacy was always
beyond dispute; his divine right to rule was not even questioned, and
was buttressed against possible criticism not only by the universal
concurrence of all religious and philosophic opinion, but by the joyful
loyalty of the whole body of his female subjects. Moses and Zoroaster,
St. Paul and Plato all bore witness to his supremacy, and the jury of
women brought in a unanimous verdict in his favour without calling for
testimony.
Women yet living can recall a day when they forgot their pain for
joy that a man-child--heir to that famous line of kings--was born
into the world. They can remember a time when their own greatest
claim to consideration rested upon the fact that they were capable of
perpetuating the royal race. They recollect a period when even from his
cradle the boy was set apart to be served with that special reverence
reserved for those whose brows are bound with the sacred circlet of
sovereignty--when a particular divinity did hedge even the meanest
male; a tenfold essence being shed about all those who were of the
House of Aaron.
Why then--since all this is of so recent existence, since man's rule
was founded so deep on woman's loyalty--has he been swelling the
melancholy ranks of Kings in Exile? For that he has ceased to reign
over woman does not require even to be asserted. It is self-evident.
When was this amazing revolution effected? Who led the _emeute_ that
thrust man from his throne? It is a revolt without a history; without
the record of a single battle. Not even a barricade can be set up
to its credit, and yet no more important revolution can be found in
the pages of the oldest chronicles. So venerable, so deep-rooted in
the eternal verities seemed the authority of man over woman that the
female mind, until the present day, never doubted its inevitableness.
Indeed, as is the case with all loyal natures, she was jealous for
the absolutism of her master, and was quick to repair any such small
omissions as he himself might have made in the completeness of his
domination. All of her sex were trained from their earliest infancy to
strive for but one end--to make themselves pleasing to their rulers.
Success in the court of man was the end and aim of their existence,
the only path for their ambition, and no other courtiers ever rivalled
these in the subtle completeness of their flattery. Man's despotism,
of course, like all other tyrannies, was tempered by his weaknesses,
but while woman wheedled and flattered and secretly bent him to her
projects she did not question his real right to govern.
Here and there through the past there arose a few scattered pioneers
in recalcitrance. One of the first to deny the innate supremacy of
the male was a woman who herself wore a crown. Elizabeth Tudor had a
fashion of laying heavy hands upon her rightful lords whenever they
displeased her, and she appears to have rejected the whole theory of
feminine subordination. John Knox--strong in the power of the priest,
whose sublimated prerogatives man had skilfully retained in his own
hands--could and did dominate Mary Stuart even upon the throne, but
when he blew from Geneva his "First Blast of the Trumpet Against the
Monstrous Regiment of Woman," and called all the ages to witness that
the rule of a female was an affront to nature that trenchant lady who
held the English sceptre forbade him ever again to set foot in her
domains, and before he could do so, in his need, he had to digest a
most unwholesome dose of humble pie.
Elizabeth, however, was a unique personality and had few imitators.
The literature of her day abounds with expressions of supreme humility
and loyalty from the one sex to the other. Elizabethan poets deigned
to play at captivity and subjection to the overwhelming charms of
Saccharissa and her sisters, and turned pretty phrases about her
cruelty, but this was merely poetic license of expression. All
serious, unaffected expression of conviction, such as was to be found
in the religious writings of the time, and in the voluminous private
correspondence, which gives us the most accurate description obtainable
of the real actions and opinions of our ancestors, never suggested a
doubt of man's natural and inalienable superiority, mental, moral, and
physical. So undisturbed was this conviction, down almost to our own
day, that the heresy of Mary Wollstonecraft gave the severest of shocks
to her own generation. So heinous seemed her offence of _lèse-majesté_
in questioning man's divine right that one of the most famous of her
contemporaries did not hesitate to stigmatize her as "a hyena in
petticoats."
History gives us but one record of a general outbreak. In the
thirteenth century the Crusades had so drained Europe of its
able-bodied men that the women were forced to apply themselves to
the abandoned trades and neglected professions. They shortly became
so intoxicated by the sense of their own competency and power that
when the weary wearers of the cross returned from the East they were
at first delighted to discover that their affairs were prospering
almost as well as ever, and then amazed and disgusted to find the
women reluctant to yield up to their natural rulers these usurped
privileges. Stern measures were necessary to oust them. Severe laws
were enacted against the admission of women into the Guilds--the
labour organizations which at that period governed all the avenues
of industrial advancement; and the doors of the professions were
peremptorily slammed in the women's faces. Such episodes as these,
however, were detached and accidental. Female treason never dared
unrebuked to lift its horrid head until within the present generation.
The emancipated new woman has various methods of accounting for the
humbling of this hoary sovereignty. Some find it only a natural
concomitant of the general wreck of thrones and monarchical
privilege--in other words, that it is but one phase of advancing
democracy. By some it is supposed that in this Age of Interrogation
man's supremacy, along with all other institutions, has been called
upon to produce an adequate reason for being, and producing no answer
that seems satisfactory, he has been summarily forced to abandon
pretensions which rested merely upon use and wont. It is said by some
that woman has been examining with coldly unprejudiced eye the claim of
man to rule, has been measuring his powers against her own and has not
been daunted by the comparison. The more noisy declare that she has
stripped him of his royal robe and that, like Louis XIV., minus his
high heels and towering peruke, she finds him only of medium stature
after all; that she has turned the rays of a cynical democracy upon
the mystery encompassing his Kingship and refuses to be awed by what
she sees there; that it is because of this she begins to usurp his
privileges, thrust herself into his professions, shoulder him even from
the altar, and brazenly seating herself on the throne beside him she
lifts the circlet from his brows to try if it be not a fit for her own
head.
The weakness of all such explanations is that they do not take into
account the fact that woman is not by nature democratic. Whatever
political principles the occasional or exceptional woman may
profess, the average woman is in all her predilections intensely
aristocratic;--is by nature loyal, idealistic, an idolater and a hero
worshipper. Strong as the spirit of democracy may be, it could not
by itself alone in one generation change the nature of woman. The
explanation must lie elsewhere.
In the language of a now famous arraignment--"_J'accuse_" man himself.
No ruler is ever really dethroned by his subjects. No hand but his own
ever takes the crown from his head. No agency but his can wash the
chrism from his brow. It is his own abdication that drives him from
power--abdication of his duties, his obligations, his opportunities.
Ceasing to rule, he ceases to reign. When he ceases to lead he wants
for followers, and the revolt which casts him from power is only the
outward manifestation of his previous abdication of the inward and
spiritual grace of kingship. When man ceased to govern, woman was not
long in throwing off the sham of subjection that remained.
Like other subjects, woman required of her master two things--_panem
et circenses_,--bread and circuses. When the industrial changes
brought about by the introduction of machinery put an end to the
old patriarchal system of home manufactures, man found it less
easy to provide for his woman-kind--more especially his collateral
woman-kind--and without any very manifest reluctance he turned her out
into the world to shift for herself. Here was a shock to her faith and
loyalty! The all-powerful male admitted his inability to provide for
these sisters, cousins, aunts, and more distant kin who had looked up
to him as the fount of existence, and had toiled and fed contentedly
under his roof, yielding to him obedience as the natural provider and
master. Woman went away sorrowful and--very thoughtful.
This alone was not enough to quite alienate her faith, however. Woman
was still, as always, a creature of imagination--dazzled by colour, by
pomp, by fanfaronade. She was still a creature of romance, adoring the
picturesque, yielding her heart to courage, to power, to daring and
endurance--all the sterner virtues which she herself lacked. The man of
the past was often brutal to her--overbearing always, cruel at times,
but he fascinated her by his masterfulness and his splendour. She might
go fine, but he would still be the finer bird. When she thought of him
she was hypnotized by a memory of gold, a waving of purple, a glitter
of steel, a flutter of scarlet. He knew that this admiration of hers
for beauty and colour was as old as the world. From primordial periods
the male has recognized this need of the female. The fish in the sea,
the reptile in the dust, the bird in the forest, the wild beast in the
jungle are all aware of their mates' passion for gleaming scales, for
glowing plumes, for dappled hides and orgulous crests of hair. They
know, they have always known, that no king can reign without splendour.
Only man, bent solely upon his own comfort and, it would seem, upon the
abandonment of his power, deliberately sets himself against this need
of the female, which has become imbedded in her nature through every
successive step up in the scale of evolution. He alone fatuously prides
himself on the dark, bifurcated simplicity of his attire, intended only
for warmth and ease and constructed with a calculated avoidance of
adornment. To avoid criticism he has set up a theory that a superior
sort of masculinity is demonstrated by the dark tint and unbeautiful
shape of garments (as if the fighting man, the soldier--who is nothing
if not masculine--were not always a colourful creature); and chooses to
ignore or resent woman's weakness for this same gold-laced combatant,
and for the silken, picturesque actor.
"_J'accuse_" the man of abandoning his mastership and becoming a
bourgeois in appearance and manner through a slothful desire for
ease. There can hardly be a question that Louis le Grand's red heels
and majestic peruke were uncomfortable and a bore, but his sense of
humour and his knowledge of men were such that his bed curtains were
never untucked until his lion's mane had been passed in to him on the
end of a walking stick, and was safely in its place. He could imagine
how unimposing the King of Beasts might be in _négligé_. He knew that
to be reverenced one must be imposing. Louis the Unfortunate found
it far less tedious to abandon stateliness, and work wigless and
leather-aproned at his locksmith's forge, while his feather-headed
queen played at being a dairy-maid at Trianon, forgetting that the
populace, which had submitted humbly to the bitter exactions of the man
who dazzled them, seeing the bald head and leathern apron would get
abruptly up from its knees and say: "What! submit to the pretensions
of a locksmith and a dairy-maid--common folk like ourselves--certainly
not!" and proceed to carry their sovereign's suggestion of equality to
the distressingly logical conclusion to be found at the mouth of the
guillotine.
"_J'accuse_" man of carrying further this democracy of sex by adding
rigid plainness of behaviour to ugliness of appearance, forgetting that
a woman, like the child and the savage, love pomp of manner as well
as of garment, and that what she does not see she finds it hard to
believe. Every wise lover soon learns it is necessary to reinforce the
tenderness of his manner by definite assurances of affection several
times in every twenty-four hours. Then, and then only, is a woman sure
she is loved.
How can she believe man heroic unless he use the appearance and manner
of the hero?
Sir Hilary of Agincourt, returning from France, found his lady
from home, and he and all his weary men-at-arms sat there--mailed
cap-à-pié--throughout the entire night until she returned to welcome
them home and receive their homage. What if at other times Sir Hilary
may have been something of a brute? Lady Hilary, flattered by this
fine piece of steel-clad swagger, would, remembering it, forgive a
thousand failures of temper or courtesy.
When El Ahmed held the pass all through the darkness while his women
fled across the desert, and his foes feared to come to hand grips with
him, not knowing he stood there dead,--propped against the spear he had
thrust into his mortal wound to hold himself erect--there was no female
revolt against the domination of men who were capable of deeds that so
fired women's imaginations.