None so poor but they may build fairy castles in the air;
none so wretched but they may fondly gaze upon the fickle
star of Hope, flaming ever in that Heaven we see by Faith.
A man, worn with suffering and sorrow and sin, was toiling
homeward in the night from a far hunter's camp, whither he
had been banished by a doctor's edict, "Rest from labor
lest ye die." "That indeed is a misfortune," he had said,
and redoubled his vigils at the desk. Then they brought his
little son, the last gem in the sacred circle of the home
whose breaking up broke his heart, and placed the child
upon his knee. He looked at its fair face and said, "I will
go." A man for whom the shadows should still be
falling toward the west, but old before his time, deep
scarred by angry storms, battered and bruised like some
presumptuous mortal who had seized his puny spear and
plunged into such wars as the Titans were wont to wage
upon the Grecian Gods. The jaded steed stumbled along
the dark and dangerous way, while its rider dreamed with
wide open eyes and sometimes muttered to himself in that
dreary solitude.
"There's one comes after--in dying I do not die, in losing I
simply pass the sword from sire to son. I may but fill a
ditch for a better to mount upon and win the mural crown.
What, then, if that other be----"
The owl hooted as he passed, and from the thicket came
the angry snarl of wolves. "How human!" he bitterly
exclaimed. "Hoots and hungry howls, all along life's path--
a weird pilgrimage in the dark."
He nodded, his head bowing almost to the saddle-bow,
then awoke humming, he knew not why,
"As long as the heart knows passion.
As long as life, as long."
His dog, a powerful mastiff, bristled and uttered an angry
growl as a great gray wolf slunk along in the dry grass but
a few yards distant. "The brutes follow the wounded," he
muttered, "and I am stricken deep." He unslung his heavy
fowling-piece and fired. The eyes of the brute glowed like
green globes of phosphorescence in the light of the gun,
then sank down with a howl that drew its comrades about
it, not to succor and to save, but to tear and rend. He
watched them a moment, muttering again, "How human!"
and turning to an aged oak that spread its branches wide,
built a fire of brush and bivouacked. But he could not
sleep--the blue devils were playing at hide-and-seek within
his heart, and phantoms that once were flesh came
trooping from out the gloom and hovered round him. He
put out his hands to them, he cried to them to speak to
him, but they receded into the darkness from whence they
came--the grave had given up its dead only to mock him, to
emphasize his utter desolation. He embraced the sturdy
oak as though he would draw strength from its stubborn
heart which had defied the storms of a thousand years,
then sank prostrate at its base and, with only dumb animals
to note his weakness, wept as only strong men weep when
shivered by the bolts of Destiny.
"One left--but one of those I loved; my strength is broken,
my labors are in vain--I can but die; yet must I live, lest the
one in whom is centered all my hopes, doth fall in evil ways
and also come to naught."
He dreamed of the days that were dead, and of those
rushing upon him from the mystic future, "each bearing its
burden of sorrow." He trod again life's thorny path, from
the cradle to manhood's somber noon, a path strewn with
wreck and wraith and wet with blood and tears. Again the
well-known forms came from beyond the firelight and,
winding their shadowy arms about his neck, wept for his
loneliness. He tried to embrace them, to gather them to his
heart as in the old days when they welcomed his
homecoming with glad acclaim, but clutched only air--his
kisses fell on vacancy. As they receded into the gloom he
followed crying, "Stay! Stay!" and wandered here and
there through bogs and briers and over the rough rocks,
calling them each by name with many an endearing term,
until he fell exhausted, and, putting forth his hand to break
his fall, encircled the neck of his faithful dog and lay there
bruised and bleeding. Then other phantoms came, two
women, one old, one young, bearing a ghastly burden,
around which little children wailed. They laid it down at his
feet, a horrid thing with wide-scaring eyes and gaping
wounds all wet with gore. And the elder bowed herself
upon it and kissed the rigid hands, the lips and hair and
moaned that she was left childless in her age, but the
younger stood erect, imperious, the frightened children
clinging to her skirts and, calling him by a name that froze
his blood, bade him look upon her widowhood.
"It was self-defense," he doggedly replied, as he met the
glance of her scornful eyes.
"O egotist!" she cried; "must a man die that a dog may
live? Must a mother's gray hairs be brought in sorrow to
the grave; must the heart of a wife be crushed within a
bloody hand and children never know a father's loving care,
that such a thing as thou may'st yet encumber this fair
earth? Precious indeed must be that life, purchased at
such a price!"
But again the forms that had fled returned, and one, a frail,
sweet-faced woman with a world of pity in her eyes, stood
between him and his accuser. She took the scornful
woman's hand and gently said: "Sister, 'twas thee or me,
'twas thine or mine;" and in the music of her voice the
ghastly object vanished.
The hoot of the owl and the howl of the wolf grew faint and
far away; he fell into an uneasy slumber and saw himself,
aged and gray, trying to keep pace with a fair youth, who
mounted with free and graceful step a mountain whose
summit was crowned with the light of everlasting day.
Steeper and steeper grew the path, yet he strove with
failing strength. The youth reached out a strong hand to
him and said, "Lean on me;" but he put it back, crying
fiercely: "No! no! climb thou alone farther I cannot go. On!
On to the summit, where breaks the great white light, and
there is no death!"
The youth struggled with the steeps and overcame them
one by one, and mounted higher and ever higher, until
he stood where never man had stood, the glory of
the gods upon his face, the immortelles upon his brow.
And people wondered and said to him, "Who is it that
stands upon the mountain top where only tread the gods?"
And he answered, "It is I--it is my other self." And they
said, "The poor old man is mad; let be, let be."
The dog crept closer to its master and laid its head upon
his breast. The vision changed, and he sat by a seacoal
fire in chambers that once had echoed the glad voices of
those whose graves were 'mid the soughing pines. He held
his one treasure to his heart and sang to it the old ditties
that its mother was wont to sing when soothing her babe to
slumber, until the golden head drooped low upon his breast.
He wove about it fond dreams of what should be in the
years to come, when, grown to manhood, it entered the
arena of the world. A bony hand stole over his shoulder
and seized the child, and looking up he beheld Death
standing by his chair. He clasped his treasure close and
struggled with the grisly specter, but it only mocked him,
and tearing the child from him, fled into the outer void. He
struggled to his feet and from his parched lips there burst a
cry that echoed and reechoed through the dark woods and
was hurled back from the distant hills.
At dawn the rustics found him, lying cold as his rocky bed,
the beaded dew upon his grizzled beard, his horse with
head low hanging over him, his dog keeping watch and
ward.
* * *
POOR OLD TEXAS.
'Twas said in days of old that misfortune never comes
singly. The fates are turning upon Texas an unkindly eye.
She is o'erwhelmed quite, sunk in the Serbonian bogs of
dark despair. First our mighty Democratic majority
slipped up on the Hoggeian banana peel and drove
its vertebrae through the crown of its convention plug, while
unfeeling Populists and Republicans jeered and flouted us.
Then our blessed railway kermishen lost its linchpin and the
soulless corporations heaped coals of fire upon our heads
by reducing rates, thereby making our boasted wisdom a
byword and a reproach. The cyclone swooped down upon
us from Kansas and swiped our crops, making our boasts
that here was an Elysium beyond the storm-belt sound as
hollow as Adam's dream of Eden after he was lifted over
the garden wall. Still we bore up and presented a bold, if
not an unbroken front to a carping world. But the vials of
wrath were not yet exhausted. Pandora's box had not yet
emptied itself of all its plagues. Our sorrow's crown of
sorrow was yet to come. It is here; our humiliation is
accomplished, our agony is complete. A lone highwayman
has held up and robbed a populous passenger train in
Texas--in West Texas, the rendezvous of the sure-enough
bad man, who catches catamounts and clips their claws,--
who defies whole barrels o' Jersey lightning and uses the
bucking-broncho for his laughter, yea, his sport! Shades o'
Ben Thompson and Luke Short, has it come to this,--that a
rank stranger can lasso a Texas train, drive the passengers
under the seats, plunder them at his pleasure, with no one
to molest or make him afraid! Half a hundred Texans
trembling at sight of one gun were a sight worth seeing,--
and they did not even know it was loaded! Gone is our
ancient glory--our rep. is irretrievably in the tureen.
Henceforth when a pilgrim from the pathless Southwest
registers at an Eastern hotel the bell-boys will not fall over
each other to do him honor as a dime-novel hero, nor the
gilded clerk insure his life before politely requesting him to
pay in advance. The last lingering shadow of our greatness
hath departed. The tenderfoot will trample upon us,
and the visiting capitalist neglect to ask us up to the bar.
The fair ladies of other lands will no longer worship us as
the picturesque knights of a reckless but romantic chivalry.
They will remember that in a whole trainload of Texans
there was not one who would fight even on compulsion,--
will sweep by with frigid hauteur, leaving us to weep for the
days that are no more. Alas, poor Texas!
* * *
THE SEVENTH COMMANDMENT.
A correspondent wants to know what I think of "the
Single Standard of Morals, which assumes that tampering
with the Seventh Commandment is as demoralizing to men
as to women."
The single standard of morals, like the single standard of
money, would be a magnificent thing were there at least
double the present amount of raw material for it to
measure. I hope to see the day when the libertine will be
relegated to the social level of the prostitute where he
logically belongs; but we are not dealing now with theories,
but with actual conditions. I trust that I may speak plainly
on this delicate subject without offending the unco' guid or
giving the priorient pulpiteers a pain. I believe the sexes
should be equally pure--when I make a world all my women
shall be paragons of virtue, and all my men he-virgins. I'll
construct no Messalinas nor Cleopatras, no Lovelaces or
Sir Launcelots. I'll people the world with St. Anthonys and
Penelopes, Josephs and Rebecca Merlindy Johnsings. I'll
apply the soft pedal to the fierce scream of passion and pull
all the barbs from the arrows that whiz from the Love God's
bow. Life will not then be quite so exhilarating, but it will be
much better worth the living. Meantime a little
spraining of the Seventh Commandment is by no
means so demoralizing to man as to woman, despite the
frantic protests of those who would drag the millennium in
by the ears by forcing upon society, willy nilly, the single
standard of morals. Man is the grosser animal, has not so
far to fall; the shock to his sensibilities is not so serious--he
is not so amenable to shame. A coat of black paint ruins a
marble Diana, but has little appreciable effect on an iron
Hercules. Illicit intercourse is not so demoralizing to man
as to woman, for the further reason that it is not considered
so great a crime. An act is demoralizing or degrading in
proportion as the perpetrator thereof considers it criminal,
as it lowers his self-respect; and men regard their crinolinic
peccancy as a venial fault, while women consider such
lapses on the part of their sex as grievous sin; hence the
lightning of lust scarce blackens the pillar while it shatters
the vase. The moral effect of an act is determined by the
prevailing standard of ethics. Were polyandry the general
practice, a woman could have a multiplicity of husbands
and be considered pure; where polygamy is the rule, a man
may have a multitude of wives and be regarded as moral.
Ethical codes ever adapt themselves to conditions.
Solomon was one of the most honorable men of his age,
but were he alive to-day he would be branded as a
shameless lecher, a contumacious criminal. There have
been religions, existing through long ages and extending
over vast empires, in which the organs of generation were
considered as sacred symbols and prostitution in the
purlieus of the temple regarded as pleasing to the gods. It
is easy enough for bigoted ignorance to brand those people
as barbarians; but in many provinces of art and science
they have ever remained our masters. "The tents of the
maidens" were simply places where fair religious
enthusiasts sold themselves to the first stranger who
offered them a piece of silver, and laid their gains upon the
altar of the gods. The robber barons of old-time Germany,
the diplomatic liars of medieval Italy, the thieves of ancient
Lacedaemon and the polygamists of biblical Palestine
considered themselves as respectable people, and as they
were so regarded by their compatriots, they were not
morally degraded by their deeds. But the robber and the
liar, the thief and the polygamist of this age are cattle of
quite another color--there has been a radical change in the
moral code, the peccadillos of the past have become the
crimes of the present. The cross, once an obscene pagan
symbol, has been transformed from an emblem of
reproduction into one of destruction; the "tents of the
maidens" are struck; Corinth no longer implores the gods to
increase the number and enhance the beauty of its
courtesans; Venus Pandemos has given place to Our Lady
of Pain, and the obscene Dionysius fled before a crucified
Christ. No more does the fair religious postulant play the
bacchante in flower-strewn palaces while naked Cupids
crown the brimming cup and sandaled feet beat time on
polished cedar floors to music that is the cry of brute
passion in the blood--kneeling in the cold gray dawn upon
the stones she clasps a marble cross. The wanton worship
of the flesh has passed with the world's youth; but though
much of man's crassness has been purged away in Time's
great crucible, he is still of the earth earthy and clings
tenaciously to his ancient prerogative of polygamy. When
he marries, society does not really expect him to respect
his oath to "forsake all others"--regards it as a formal bow
to the convenances, a promise with a mental reservation
annex; but it considers a woman's vow as sacred and the
breaking thereof as rankest blasphemy. He is allowed but
one wife, but he may have a score of mistresses and
society will placidly wink the other eye--until some
tearful maiden requires him to share the shame she can no
longer conceal or an "injured husband" goes a-gunning.
This should not be so, but so it is. There be fools, both
male and female, who will rise up to exclaim that this is
false; but that it is Gospel truth is proven every day in the
year in every community on the American continent. Men
with reputations for licentiousness that would shame old
Silenus are cordially received in the most exclusive society.
They are found at every high-falutin' "function," bending
over the white hands of the most accomplished ladies in
the land; on every ballroom floor, encircling the waists of
debutantes; in the parlors of our best people, paying
court to their young daughters. The noblest women in this
world become their wives--fondly undertake their
"reformation" while indignantly drawing their skirts aside
lest they come in contact with the tawdry finery of females
whom these lawless satyrs have debauched. Of course
when a woman learns that her reformatory work has proven
a failure, drear and dismal, she complains bitterly, may
even demand a divorce; yet she could count upon the
fingers of one hand the hubbies whom she would trust
behind a sheet of paper with a wayward daughter. She
doesn't believe a little bit in the virtue of the genus male,
yet insists that her own husband be a saint--assumes that
her own charms should cause him to regard all other
women with indifference, and when she learns of his
polygamous practices suffers all the pangs of wounded
pride.
If a woman be homely as a bois d'arc hedge she may
suppose the world supercharged with St. Anthonys, for she
has not been much sought; but if she be beautiful and has
mingled much with men she realizes all too well that the
story of Joseph is a foolish romance or that Mrs. Potiphar
was quite passe. And though she be pure as a vestal
virgin of Rome's best days she secretly despises the
man with whom she does not have to stand just a
little bit on the defensive. Of course she demands that her
male acquaintances shall be gentlemen and treat her with
due courtesy and respect; but it nettles her not a little to
learn that her charms are altogether ignored. She likes to
feel her power, to know that she is good in the eyes of
men, something desired--that her virtue is a priceless jewel
over which she must ever keep close guard; hence she
likes best the male she is compelled to watch, while a man
has absolutely no use for wife or mistress upon whose
fealty he would not lay his life. The result is that when a
woman commits one sexual sin she puts hope behind her,
her feet take hold on Hell, she sinks lower and lower until
she becomes the shameless associate of bummers and
bawds. She is made to feel that she has murdered her
womanhood, that the red cross of Cain blazes upon her
brow. Realizing that she is a social outcast, a moral pariah,
she becomes reckless, defiant, and finally glories in
betraying the fool who trusts her. No matter how fair the
mountain upon which she has leave to feed, she will batten
on the moor. Love was her excuse when first she went
astray, and she hugs the delusion to her heart that Cupid
can sanctify a crime; but where honor spreads not its wings
of snow love perishes in the fierce simoon of lust. The man
with whom she enters the primrose path feels that he is as
good as his fellows. He may watch with a sigh her descent
to the noisome regions of the damned; but comforts himself
with the reflection that she would have found her way to
hades without his help--that
"Virtue as it never will be moved,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
And prey on garbage"--
that had he played the prude she would have found
another and perhaps a baser paramour. He knows that the
stain of lechery is on his soul but draws comfort from the
fact that such is the common heritage of his sex, forgets his
victim and struggles toward the stars. He is financially
honest, generous, and guards the honor of wife and
daughters as God's best gift. His amorous dalliance with
others instead of weaning him from his wife, causes him to
regard her with greater veneration, to contrast her purity
with his own pollution, her virtue with another's vice.
Paradoxical as it may appear, there are no men in this
world who so reverence good women as those who are
notorious for their illicit amours. I am not, of course,
speaking of the consorts of common courtesans, of human
hogs; but of the men who people the red-light district with
their cast-off mistresses.
Pitiful as it may appear, it hurts a man more to trifle with
the Eighth Commandment once than to break the Seventh
a thousand times--he is worse demoralized by stealing a
mangy mule than by ruining a maid. The male lecher may
be in all things else a lord; the thief is considered altogether
and irremediably corrupt. Society will tolerate the one if his
offense be not too flagrant, but to the other it refuses even
the shadow of forgiveness. For three centuries the world
has been trying to explain away Shakespeare's poaching,
but has not thought it worth while to even apologize for his
sexual perversity. Washington caught his death while
keeping an assignation with a neighbor's wife; but there's
little said about it--he's still the "father of his country,"
including seventy million people of all classes and colors.
Had the "slight exposure which brought on a fatal
sickness," been the result of prowling in his neighbor's barn
instead of his boudoir his name would be anathema
forevermore. The world forgives him for debauching
another man's wife, but would never have forgiven him had
he raided the same man's henroost. It does not mean by
this that a scrawny pullet is of more importance than family
honor; it simply means that the man who steals a pullet is a
cowardly thief, while the one who ignores the advances of a
pretty woman is an incorrigible idiot. Ben Franklin could
have mistresses scattered all over the City of Brotherly
Love, and Dan Webster consort with all the light women of
Washington, and still be men of genius beneath whose
imperial feet Columbia was proud to lay her shining hair;
but had either been caught sneaking from a neighbor's
woodpile with a two-cent bundle of fagots, the world would
have rung with his infamy. The complaint against
Demosthenes is not that he was a libertine--a man before
whose honeyed eloquence maiden modesty and wifely
virtue were as wax; but that he threw away sword and
shield and fled like a mule-eared rabbit before the spears of
Macedon. I digress long enough to say that I have
patiently investigated the story of the great orator's flight,
and am fully convinced that it was a foul political falsehood,
just as the current story of Col. Ingersoll's cowardice and
capture is a religious lie.
Of course society has to make an occasional example and
its moral maleficence, like death, loved a shining mark. It
damned Breckinridge for getting tangled up with a desiring
maid in a closed carriage, and relegated him to the political
wilderness, yet twice elevated to the presidency the most
disreputable old Falstaff that ever vibrated between cheap
beer joints and ham-fatted old washerwomen who smelled
of stale soap-suds and undeodorized diapers. Cleveland
"told the truth"--when he had to--and was made a little tin
Jesus of by the moral jabberwocks; Breckinridge, an
infinitely better and brainier man, 'fessed up--and
couldn't go to Congress from the studhorse district of
Kentucky. When society goes hunting for scapegoats it
usually manages to get a gnat lodged in its esophagus
while relegating a mangy dromedary to its internal
economy.
Such are the conditions which prevail to-day; but I am far
from agreeing with the dictum of Pope that "whatever is, is
right." Had the world ever proceeded on that principle we
would still be honoring robbers and liars, thieves and
polygamists. The wider license accorded man harmonizes
neither with divine law, decency nor the canons of common
sense. We place womanly virtue on a pedestal and
worship it while tacitly encouraging men to destroy it. We
overlook the fact that a man cannot fracture the Seventh
Commandment without considerable assistance. We
should adopt a loftier standard of morality, nobler ideals for
men. Because he is more earthly than woman it does not
follow that he should be made altogether of muck. He has
made some little progress since the days of Judah and
Tamar, David and Bathsheba. He no longer consorts with
courtesans on the public highway, nor pens up half a
hundred wives in a harem, then goes broke buying
concubines. He has learned that there is such a thing as
shame, assumes a virtue though he has it not, seeks to
conceal his concupiscence. What in one age society drives
to a semblance of concealment in the next it brands as
criminal, hence we may hope that at no distant day the
single standard of morals will become more than an
irridescent dream--that Josephs will not be confined
altogether to gum-chewing members of the Y.M.C.A. We
may eventually reach that moral plain where the male
debauchee will be considered a moral outcast; but the time
is not yet, and until its advent illicit commerce will continue
to be more demoralizing to women than to men.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule--there are
women who rise superior to the social law. George Eliot,
Queen Elizabeth, Sarah Bernhardt and others have
trampled the social edict beneath their feet and refused to
consider themselves sinners--have laughed an outraged
world to scorn and stood defiant, sufficient unto themselves.
Those women were intellectual amazons whom naught but
the writhen bolts of God could humble, whose genius
flamed with a white light even through the dun clouds of
lechery; but we cannot measure the workaday woman by
the few "whose minds might, like the elements, furnish
forth creation." A Bernhardt is great, not because of her
social sin, but despite thereof. With her art is the all-in-all,
sex but an incident. She is strong enough to mount the
empyrean despite the lernean serpent-coil which drags
others to perdition--to compel the world to tolerate if not
forgive the black stain in her heart because of the divine
radiance which encircles her head. Occasionally there is a
woman who can sacrifice her purity without sinking to the
slums through loss of self-respect--can still maintain the
fierce battle for fame, can be grand after she has ceased to
be good. Mrs. Grundy can rave, and every orthodox goose
stretch forth its rubberneck to express its disapproval; but
instead of bending beneath the weight of scorn, instead of
sinking into the mire of the slough upon which she has set
her feet she seems like old Antaeus, to gather fresh
strength from the earth with which to write her name among
the immortals. Queen Elizabeth is to this good day the
pride of orthodox England--she had more brains than all its
other monarchs combined; yet by solemn act of parliament
it was decreed that the first bastard born to the "Virgin
Queen" should ascend the throne of Britain. Thus was the
highest possible premium placed upon female lechery, and
it was placed there after due deliberation by a "God-
fearing," Catholic-hating Episcopalian parliament!
Fortunately for Mrs. Wettin, the present governmental
figure-head, jolly old Liz either availed herself of some of
the "preventatives" so extensively advertised in "great
family newspapers," or neglected to own her illegitimate
offspring. I cannot help but think that a love-child by
Elizabeth and the courtly Raleigh would have been a great
improvement on any of the soggy-headed things spawned
by the House of Hanover. I do not apologize for nor
condone the sexual frailties of distinguished females; the
noblest career to which any woman can aspire is that of
honest wifehood, and if she attains to that she is, though of
mediocre mind, infinitely superior to the most famous
wanton.
It is worthy of remark that most distinguished women since
the days of Sappho and Semiramis have been impure,
while not a few great men have been remarkable for their
continency. Woman has been called "the weaker vessel,"
and certain it is that men stand the glamor of greatness, the
temptations that come with riches, the white light that beats
upon a throne, much better than do Eve's fair daughters.
As a man becomes great, he respects more and more the
cumulative wisdom of the world, becomes obedient; as a
woman becomes great she grows disdainful and rebellious.
Thus it is that while in the common walks of life woman is
infinitely purer than man, as we ascend into the higher
realms, whether in art, letters or statecraft, we discover a
tendency to reverse this law until we often find great men
anchorites and great women trampling on the moral code.
There be some who explain man's larger sexual liberty on
physiological grounds, excuse it on the hypothesis of
necessity. Physicians of the ultra-progressive school have
even gone so far as to assert that continence in man is the
chief cause of impotency--have pointed out that it is
usually the wives of good men who go wrong, and insisted
that to the former hypothesis must be attributed the latter
fact. I am unable to find any reason in physiology why
such a rule should not work both ways. I have said
somewhere that man is naturally polygamous, and I might
have added with equal truth that woman is naturally
polyandrous. The difference is that woman's sexual
education began earlier and she has progressed somewhat
further from "a state of nature" wherein free love is the law.
Man early began to defend his prerogatives, to strengthen
the moral concept of his mate with a club, to frame laws for
the protection of his female property. The infraction of
established custom soon came to be considered a social
crime, an offense of which even the gods took cognizance.
Woman's polyandrous instinct yielded somewhat to
education--she was compelled to make this sacrifice upon
the altar of society. Thus was female continence not a
thing decreed by Heaven or "natural law," but was
begotten of brute force. We see a survival of the old
animalistic instinct in prostitution and the all too frequent
illicit intercourse prevailing in the higher walks of life.
Unquestionably the Seventh Commandment is violative of
natural law as applied to either sex; but most natural laws
must be amended somewhat ere we can have even a
semblance of civilization; hence we cannot excuse man's
peccadillos on that broad plea that it's "the nature of the
brute." Joseph and St. Anthony, Gautama and Sir Galahad
are ideals toward which man must ever strive with all his
strength if he would purge the subsoil out of his system--
would mount above the gutter where wallow the dumb
beasts and take his place among the gods. The custom of
thousands of years to the contrary notwithstanding, it is
damnable that a wife should be compelled to share a
husband's caresses with lewd women. Tennyson
assures us that "as the husband is the wife is."
Fortunately for society this is false; still there are thorns in
the bed and rebellion in the heart of the woman who must
play wife to a Lovelace or a Launcelot. It is not true that it
is the wives of good men who go astray; it is the wives who
are naturally corrupt or morally weak. A talented lady
contributor to the ICONOCLAST once asserted that 'tis not
for good women that men have done great deeds.
Perchance this is true, for men who do great deeds are
goaded thereto, not by the swish of crinoline, but by the
immortal gods. Such acts are bred in the bone, are born in
the blood and brain. It certainly is not for bad women that
men soar at the sun, for every man worth the killing
despises corruption in womankind. He worships on bended
knee and with uncovered head at the shrines of Minerva
and Dian, and but amuses himself by stealth at that of the
Pandemian Venus. When Antony deserted his Roman wife
for Egypt's sensuous queen, he quickly became an
enervated ass and his name thenceforth was Ichabod.
Great Caesar dallied with the same dusky wanton, but
ever in his intrepid heart ruled that "woman above
reproach." Alexander of Macedon refrained from making
the wife of Persia's conquered king his mistress. Napoleon
found time even among the thunders of war to write daily to
his wife, and when he finally turned from her it was not to
seek a fairer flame but to place a son upon the throne of
France. Grant stood forth in an era of unbridled license
unsullied as a god. Great men have been unfaithful to their
marital vows, but it has been those of mediocre minds and
india-rubber morals who have cowered at the feet of
mistresses--who have thrown their world away for reechy
kisses shared by others. While it is true that the world's
intellectual titans have seldom been he-virgins or
feathered saints, they did not draw godlike inspiration
from their own dishonor.
* * *
OPTIMISM VS. PESSIMISM.