not dress well; do not behave dramatically; but the signification of
these seemingly capricious charges lies deeper than may appear. Man has
been seized with a democratic ideal, and after applying it to political
institutions has attempted to carry it into domestic application. He
is relentlessly forcing a democracy of sex upon woman; industrially,
mentally, and sentimentally. He refuses to gratify her imagination;
he insists upon her development of that logical selfishness which
underlies all democracy, and which is foreign to her nature. Now,
nature has inexorably laid upon woman a certain share of the work that
must be done in the world. In the course of ages humanity adjusted
itself to its shared labours by developing the relation of master and
defender, of dependent and loyal vassal. Sentiment had adorned it
with a thousand graces and robbed the feudal relation of most of its
hardships. Mutual responsibilities and mutual duties were cheerfully
accepted.
Woman was obliged to perform certain duties, and these could only be
made easy and agreeable by sentiment, by unselfishness. Man needed her
ministrations as much as she needed his. He realized that sentiment
was necessary to her happiness and he accepted the duty of preserving
that sentiment of loyalty and admiration for himself which made her
hard tasks seem easy when performed for a beloved master. He took
upon himself that difficult task of being a hero to a person even
more intimate than his valet. He took the trouble to please woman's
imagination.
The hard democracy of to-day will take no note of the relation of
master and dependent. Each individual has all the rights which do not
come violently in contact with other's rights, and has no duties which
are not regulated by the law. Unselfishness is not contemplated in its
scheme. Every individual has a right to all the goods of life he can
get.
Women are beginning to accept these stern theories; beginning to apply
the cruel logic of individualism. So far from the power to win his
favour being her one hope of advancement or success, she does not
hesitate to say on occasion that to yield to his affections is likely
to hamper her in the race for fame or achievement. So far from the
giving of an heir to his greatness being the highest possibility of
her existence, she sometimes complains that such duties are an unfair
demand upon her energies, which she wishes to devote exclusively to her
own ends.
The universal unpopularity of domestic service proves that the duties
of a woman are in themselves neither agreeable nor interesting.
Where is the man in all the world who would exchange even the most
laborious of his occupations for his wife's daily existence? The
only considerations that can permanently reconcile human beings to
unattractive labours is first the sentiment of loyalty--that such
labours are performed for one who is loved and admired--and second the
fine, noble old habit of submission. These incentives to duty, these
helps to happiness, man has taken from woman by weakly shuffling off
his mastership.
I accuse man of having wilfully cast from him the noblest crown in the
world--of having wrongfully abdicated. War has at least this merit that
it forces him to drop the vulgar careless ease of the bourgeois and
resume for the time at least those bold and vigorous virtues which made
him woman's hero and her cheerfully accepted master.
June 13.
Life.
It is a toy: a jingling bauble gay,
That children grasp with wondering, wide-eyed pleasure;
Soil it with too fierce use, and find their treasure
But rags and tinsel, which at close of day
Falls from their weary hands. It is a page
Whereon the child scribbles unmeaning scrawls.
Youth's glowing pen indites sweet madrigals.
Man tells a history, and sad old age--
Seeing that all the space that he hath writ before
But wrote in varying ways his folly large--
Sets "Vanity" upon the meagre marge.
And last Time prints "The End" and turns it o'er.
July 2.
Portable Property.
The Chinese pinks are in full bloom now. I have gathered pounds of them
and arranged them in vases, and the mere outline of their feathery
grey-green foliage, set with those fringed flecks of warm colour, makes
existence seem an agreeable thing. The sound of children's voices
outside, the smell of the cut grass, and the blue of the day, all
seemed freshly sweet and pleasant because of the pleasure the freaked
beauty of the bowls full of pinks give me. I am sorry for the people
who don't care for flowers. The amiability they always awake in me is
one of my most valued bits of secret property. That is the kind of
possession that moth and rust cannot corrupt. It is safe from burglars,
and even age does not wither one's satisfaction in such belongings.
Most of my life I have been poor, as the world reckons poverty, but in
reality I have owned more than many millionaires.
It seems to me a wise thing to store up private wealth early. My nose
to me a kingdom is, and emperors and any millionaire might envy me
the possession of my ears and eyes. There are pale-souled philosophers
who declare their contempt for the power of gold, and some narrow
dull-witted folk are really oppressed by luxury--all of which seems
nonsense to me; but if one can't and most of us can't, have high
stepping horses, good frocks, paid service, and expensive homes, one
can at least own tangible treasures of smells and sights and sounds.
And, ah! the odd bits of poetry I possess....
Now rising through the rosy wine of thought
Bright-beaded memories sparkle at the brim
Of the mind's chalice. Golden phrases wrought
By the great poets bubble to its brim.
My poets--as the patterned skies are mine,
The perfumes and the murmurs of the sea
Are all mine own--their cadences divine
Seem as my goodly heritage to me.
They trace the measures of all hidden things,
And into worded magic can translate
The hidden harmonies which Nature sings;
Her mighty music inarticulate.
And who will list hears sonorous vibrations
As though their thoughts strung harps from earth to heaven
That rung with golden, glad reverberations
As wide-winged dreams breathed through their strings at even.
July 10.
Are American Parents Selfish?
P---- overwhelmed us last night at dinner by declaring that American
parents were selfish. We dropped our fish-forks and stared at him in
amazement and disgust. H---- said, severely, "You are a foreigner."
P---- couldn't truthfully deny it, and the bare statement seemed
sufficient, but H---- likes to clinch any nail he drives and he went on:
"It is admitted by every unprejudiced person--excepting, of course,
the ignorant and benighted foreigner--that the Americans are the
people, and that wisdom and virtue will necessarily die with them;
that all their customs and institutions, whether social or political,
are the wonder, the envy, and despair of other nations, which makes an
assertion like yours seem almost frivolous."
"Selfish!" I struck in, "selfish--indeed! on the contrary, the American
is blamed as the most indulgent of parents. Surely selfishness is the
last charge that can justly be made."
P---- tried to defend himself. He admitted that "if indulgence
invariably implied unselfishness the American would certainly have
nothing with which to reproach himself in his relations with his
children."
We fought the question over until late, and this is about what our
discussion came to. There can be no doubt that a fond gentleness of
rule is in this country, the law of the average household. So far as
is compatible with common sense, the children have entire liberty of
action, and, so far as the means of the parents permit, the children
are provided with every advantage and pleasure. Indeed, to such lengths
at one time did fondness go that it too often degenerated into a
laxness that made the American child a lesson and a warning to other
nations. Daisy Miller and her little, odious toothless brother were
supposed to typify the results of this fatuous feebleness of rule in
our family life, but neither Daisy nor her brother can now be held
to be typical pictures, though their prototypes still exist here and
there. The American parent of to-day rules more firmly and with greater
wisdom. Such figures as those of the unhappy girl and the odious boy
brought home to us the truth--forgotten in our passion for universal
liberty--that a relaxation of wise, strong government by the parent was
cruelty of the most far-reaching and irreparable sort.
No doubt Henry James' mordant satire helped to inaugurate a salutary
reform, and it is just possible that a new work of a similar nature is
now needed to suggest further serious reflections to American parents;
to rouse them to consider whether their whole duty is performed in
seeing their children well fed, well educated, and raised to man's
estate. With most parents the sense of responsibility ceases when the
boy begins to earn his own living, when the girl dons orange blossoms.
Like the birds, the American parent works hard to feed the nestlings,
carefully teaches them to fly, and then tumbles them out into the
world to fend for themselves. So far in our history this elemental
method has worked well, no doubt. The result of it has been to breed
the most precocious, self-reliant, vigorous, irreverent race the earth
has yet seen. One may see the whole situation epitomized in the
orchard any pleasant June day--an astonished fledgling ruffling his
feathers upon some retired bough, ruminating upon the sudden shocks
and changes of existence, and afraid almost to turn his head in the
large, new, lonesome world surrounding him. As the hours pass his
melancholy reflections are pierced by hunger's pangs. Heretofore, a
busy parent has always appeared to assuage such poignant sensations,
but now that hard-worked person may be seen--genially oblivious of
obligations--refreshing himself with cherries, and the fledgling, with
a squawk of wounded amazement, discovers for the first time that even
parents are not to be depended upon. His hunger meantime grows. An
opportune insect flits by and is snapped at involuntarily. It proves
to be of refreshing and sustaining quality, and digestion brings
courage. A hop and a flutter show the usefulness of wing and limb. More
luck with insects demonstrates that the world belongs to the bold,
and before the day is done the cocky young nestling of yesterday is
shouldering his papa away from the ripest cherries.
All this is very well in a world where flies and cherries are free to
all, but America is fast ceasing to be a happy uncrowded orchard in
which the young find more than enough room and food for the taking.
In the past, the boy--inured to plain living and a certain amount of
labour from childhood--had only to take the girl of his choice by the
hand and go make a home out of virgin soil, wheresoever chance or fancy
led, himself and his parents both confident he could not suffer in a
land where only industry was needed to ensure conquest. These boundless
possibilities relieved the parent of half the cares incident to the
relation, and that sense of freedom from responsibility has remained,
while conditions have altered. The bird-like fashion of refusing
further liability once the child has made his first flight is still the
rule.
To the European parent this seems a most flagrant abandonment of duty.
There the anxious care for the offspring reaches out to the third and
fourth generation, and every safeguard which law or custom can devise
is thrown around the child. From the moment of its birth the parent
of Continental Europe begins to save, not only for the education and
upbringing, but for the whole future existence of the child. It is not
alone the daughter who is dowered, but the son also has provision made
for his married life, when, as his parents keenly realize, the greatest
strain will be made upon his resources and capabilities.
In America it is the custom--very nearly the universal custom--for
the parents to spend upon the luxuries and pleasures of the family
life the whole income. The children are educated according to this
standard of expenditure, and are accustomed to all its privileges.
No thought is taken of the time when they must set up households for
themselves--almost invariably upon a very different scale from the one
to which they have been used. To the American parent this seems only
a natural downfall. He remarks cheerfully that he himself began in a
small way, and it will do the young people no harm to acquire a similar
experience--forgetting that in most cases the children have been
educated to a much higher standard of ease than that of his own early
life. The parents do not consider it obligatory to leave anything
to their children at death. They have used all they could accumulate
during their own lifetime; let their children do the same. The results
of the system are crystallized in the American saying: "There are but
three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves." The man who
acquires wealth spends what he makes. His children, brought up in
luxury, struggle unsuccessfully against conditions to which they are
unused, and the grand-children begin in their shirt sleeves to toil for
the wealth dissipated by the two preceding generations.
Europeans frequently and curiously remark upon the American's
prodigality of ready money. The small change which they part with so
reluctantly the American flings about with a fine mediæval profusion.
The manner of life of the average well-to-do person in this country
permits of it. The average man who earns ten or twenty thousand a
year invests none of it. He installs his family in a rented house in
the city in winter. Several servants are kept; the children are sent
to expensive schools. All the family dress well, eat rich food, and
indulge in costly amusements. In summer they either travel abroad, live
in a hotel at a watering place, or rent again. The man's whole income
is at his disposal to spend every year. None of it is deducted to be
safely stored in property. When his daughters marry he expects their
husbands to be solely responsible for their future, and if they do not
succeed in marrying wealth, why so much the worse for them. When his
sons begin their career he looks to them to be self-supporting almost
from the first, and not to undertake the responsibilities of a family
until they are able to bear such a burden without aid from him. He
cannot assist them without materially altering his own scale of living,
which he is naturally loath to do. At his death the income generally
ceases in large part, and his widow, and such children as may still be
unplaced in life, are obliged to relinquish the rented houses and the
way of life to which they have been used.
To a Frenchman such an existence would seem as uncertain and disturbing
as is generally supposed to be that of a person who has built upon
the crust of a volcano. He could not contemplate with equanimity the
thought of chaos overtaking the ordered existence of his family upon
his demise. _Après nous le deluge_ seems to him the insouciance of a
maniac, or of a monster of selfishness. Daily expenditure is regulated
within a limit which permits of a constant investment of a margin. When
his daughter marries he insures in her carefully guarded dower that she
shall continue her existence on somewhat the same scale to which she
has been accustomed, and, in case of premature widowhood or accident
of fortune, she and her children shall not be called upon to face the
desperate strait of absolute pennilessness. He may deny her in her
girlhood many of the indulgences common to her American prototype, but
he denies himself at the same time in saving to insure the security
and comfort of her future. The French father would think it terrible
that a tenderly nurtured daughter should be suddenly thrust into abject
dependence upon a husband who may possibly abuse the power given him by
that circumstance, nor would he be more satisfied to think that she
should, during her first years of married life, while still young and
encountering the strain of motherhood, be called upon to face narrow
means and a perilously uncertain financial condition.
When the son arrives at maturity the economies to which he, in company
with his parents, has submitted, bear fruit in substantial aid in
beginning his career, and he is not obliged to put out of his mind all
thought of marriage during his youth, since his parents, and those
of the woman of his choice, have provided for this very contingency
through all the years of his minority.
The French--with the logical inevitableness of their mode of
thought--carry this view of life to its extreme limit, but throughout
all Europe, including England, the responsibility of the parent is
more broadly conceived than in this country, where the excuse for an
infinity of cheap flimsiness is the cynical phrase, "It will last
my time." Men build cheaply, and forbear to undertake work of which
they cannot see the immediate result, because there is no sense of
obligation to the coming generation. The democratic theory is that
each man must fight for his own hand; no debt is owed to either
ancestry or posterity. The mind is not shocked by sudden destruction
of families, by the sharp descent in the social scale, or the flinging
of women into the arena of the struggle for life. The parent is quite
willing to share with the child the goods of existence as far as he can
achieve them, but he is unwilling to deny either child or himself that
the child may benefit alone, or after he is gone.
Conditions in America are constantly assimilating themselves more and
more to those existing in the older countries, where the conflict for
existence is close and intense, and where the prudent, the careful,
and the far-sighted inevitably crowd out the weaker and more careless
individuals and families. An almost unmistakable sign of "an old
family" in America is conservatism in expenditure and modes of life.
The newly rich, who set the pace of public luxury, are always amazed
at the probates of the wills of these quiet citizens. They cannot
believe that one who spent so little should have so much, not realizing
that the simplicity of life made it possible to solidly invest a
surplus. The heirs of this solid wealth have been bred to prudence
and self-denial. Such a family survives, while in all probability
the offspring of the other type may in two generations be hopelessly
trodden into the mire.
There is in the breasts of many parents a half-resentful feeling that
they should not be asked to sacrifice themselves to the new generation.
They insist upon their own right to all that is to be got out of life,
feeling that what they give to the children is never repaid. This
selfish type forgets that in doing their duty they are but returning to
their children what they themselves received from the past generation,
and that the children will in turn pay to their descendants the
inherited debt of honour with interest.
July 30.
A Question of Heredity.
I was lunching out to-day, and sat beside Mrs. C---- S----. She told
me her daughter was so hoping that the new child would be a girl. Four
boys seemed a superfluity of masculinity in one household.
"I wish there was some way of knowing beforehand about such things,"
she complained.
"When F---- came," I said, airily, "there was the same feeling in
our family; we all wanted so that she should be a girl. H---- was so
comforting. He said she certainly would be, if there was anything
in heredity; her mother was a girl, and all her aunts, and both her
grandmothers. And she did turn out to be a girl, you see."
Mrs. C---- S---- looked at me with her mild blue eyes, and said,
happily--"I wonder if there is really anything in that; for you know
it's just the same in our family!"
October 6.
The Little Dumb Brother.
I have been reading in one of the magazines a record of travel in the
Rocky Mountains of the Arctic regions. It is illustrated with pictures
of some ten polar bear skins--two of them evidently mere babies of
bears--a dead ram, a dead caribou--the former killed, the author
explains, to furnish the first food he had in forty-four hours. He
concludes his article with this naive charge: "Wolves, when pressed
by hunger, do not hesitate to fall upon one of their own number and
sacrifice it to their beastly cravings. They are utterly lacking in
conscience, and the young or weak of every class of land animals suffer
from their wanton lack of mercy."
Such wicked wolves! And how about those baby bears?
It is the same point of view as that of the Spanish bull fighters.
"They are not Christians--they have no souls--why consider them?"
As I have said before, very probably the decent, well-behaved, kindly
Roman citizen of Nero's day, returning with his family from a pleasant
afternoon at the gladiatorial shows, gathered his children about
the household altar, offered pious libation to the gods, and went
peacefully to bed with a clean and untroubled conscience. It was all
simply a question of the point of view. A Roman citizen was certainly
not going to be disturbed by a sense of wrong-doing in watching the
pangs of such creatures as Christians or barbarians.
The theory that human beings were each and every one in a spiritual
sense, brothers, came later to trouble this fine old crusted
indifference, and now after nearly two thousand years the idea has so
completely infiltrated human consciousness, that the death agonies
of men can no longer anywhere serve as diversion to the gentle and
the good. But behind that sweeping assumption that we of all organic
nature alone possess that element of immortality, binding us together
with spiritual ties, and laying upon all the mutual obligations of
justice and mercy, we have been nourishing a towering and brutal
egotism, that moves blindly and stupidly about amid unreckonable
multitudes of sentient fellow creatures; unaware of their lives, their
passions, or their languages. Contracted inside the shell of this
foolish prepossession we miss half the interest and wonder of the world
we inhabit, and--thinking of ourselves all the while as an honest
and merciful fellow--we play an unimaginable devil to our unhappy
neighbours.
And yet I think even we at our worst would recoil could there be set
before us in plain language the immitigable horrors of man's place
in nature written from the point of view of even the most philosophic
and amiable of the beasts. It makes the skin upon one's flesh crisp
to reflect how black would be that long chronicle of poisonings,
burnings, slayings, devourings. Those unmentionable tortures upon the
vivisector's table; those maimings and clippings of well-loved pets to
gratify a cheerful but perverted fancy; the treachery, ingratitude, and
fantastic despotism practised every day, and always--throughout the
whole indictment set forth by the accusing animals,--would be seen a
dark, everflowing stream of innocent blood, spilled purely for man's
idle recreation. The fanged Nero of the jungle, the very Heliogabalus
of the cobras would seem spotless saints contrasted with this horrid
record of the deeds of what are commonly called kindly and upright men.
The beasts had never need to invent a devil myth. The model was always
to their hand.
Cardinal Newman once remarked, with a sense of surprise, that "we know
less of the animals than we do of the angels," and when one remembers
the disproportionate attention given the two subjects this is hardly
cause for wonder. One of the favourite texts of the never-ending
debates of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages was the question whether
sixty thousand angels would have room to stand on the point of a
needle; and upon this and cognate subjects
... "Doctor and Saint--they heard great argument
About it, and About: and ever more
Came out by that same door wherein they went."
But of any study of what we call--in our topping human fashion--"the
lower orders of creation" the history of the schools contains not a
single record.